AI 时代，一家年收入近百万美元的创业公司为何不值得继续做

简要描述Brief Description

Alex Rampell 与 Town 创始人 Jean-Denis Greze 探讨了离开一家不断发展的 AI 税务业务的决定、电子邮件和日历助理背后的产品策略，以及中立代理对工作和商业的影响。Alex Rampell and Town founder Jean-Denis Greze discuss the decision to leave a growing AI tax business, the product strategy behind an email-and-calendar assistant, and the implications of neutral agents for work and commerce.

目录Table of Contents

• 简介
  Intro
• 离开 Plaid，押注中小企业税务市场
  Leaving Plaid for the SMB tax bet
• 离开一家经营良好的企业
  Walking away from a working business
• Town 的诞生
  How Town was born
• AI 办公时代的 iPhone 时刻
  The iPhone moment for AI at work
• 城镇：一台代币分配机器
  Town as a token-allocation machine
• 水平与垂直
  Horizontal vs vertical
• 为什么选择 Town，而不是 OpenAI 和 Anthropic
  Why Town over OpenAI and Anthropic
• 为什么硅谷以外的地方低估了人工智能的影响力
  Why AI is underhyped outside the Valley
• 中立代理与破裂的广告契约
  Neutral agents and the broken ad covenant

简介Intro

Ben Horowitz 给我发消息说：“我发现了一个超棒的工具，叫 Town，简直改变了我的人生。”我当时就想，等等，那不是 Jean-Denis 的公司吗？可他做的是中小企业税务啊。I get pinged by Ben Horowitz about like I found this amazing tool. It's called Town. It like changed my life. I was like wait that's Jean-Denis company but he does SMB tax.

这根本说不通。这不可能发展成一家实现风投级增长的公司。没人围绕知识工作者非常常见的工作流程打造出优秀的 AI 产品，比如开会、会前准备，以及帮助人们为一天的工作做好准备。我们正努力打造一款能与人们协作的产品，帮助他们不断发现更多运用 AI 的机会，从而更出色地完成工作。That doesn't make any sense. This was not going to be a venture scale company. No one had built great AI around these very common knowledge worker workflows like meetings, meeting prep, getting people to be prepared for their day. We're trying to build a product that works with people to find more and more opportunities for them to deploy AI to be better at their job.

运行那个东西每个月也就花你一美元左右。但有意思的是，一年里总有那么一个月，它能发现点什么。它能帮你找到价值数百、甚至数千美元的东西。产品体验不能只是一个文本框。It's going to cost you like a dollar a month to run that thing. But the interesting thing is the one month out of a year where it finds something. It's going to find like hundreds if not thousands of dollars for you. The product experience can't just be a text box.

你只需要向别人展示价值主张，并替他们完成操作。我们会根据当时的情况，选择我们认为最适合你的供应商。You have to just show the value prop to someone and do it for them. We will use whatever supplier we think is the best for you in the moment.

主持人：人类是缓慢的路由器。Host: Humans are slow routers.

嘉宾：没错。我认为，未来人类参与其中的程度会比现在低得多。Guest: That's right. And I think the future looks like a lot less human in the loop than we see today.

离开 Plaid，押注中小企业税务市场Leaving Plaid for the SMB tax bet

主持人：大家好。我是 Alex Rampell，Andreessen Horowitz 的合伙人。今天我和 Town 的首席执行官兼创始人 Jean-Denis 一起来到这里。Host: Hi everyone. I'm Alex Rampell, partner here at Andreessen Horowitz and I'm here with Jean-Denis, the CEO and founder of Town.

嘉宾：感谢邀请我。Guest: Thanks for having me.

主持人：我觉得很酷的是，你担任 Plaid 首席技术官时，我们曾合作过，而我当时在这里牵头投资了 Plaid。Host: So what I find cool is that we worked together when you were the CTO of Plaid and I had led our investment in Plaid here.

访客：是的。Guest: Yes.

主持人：我听说你要离开，然后去创业。后来我记得你告诉我，你正在开发一款面向中小企业的税务工具。Host: And I heard you were leaving and going to start a company. And then I remember you told me you're working on an SMB tax tool.

嘉宾：是的。我们喝了咖啡。我们是在门洛帕克还是帕洛阿尔托这里喝的咖啡。Guest: Yes. We had coffee. We had coffee here in Menlo or Palo Alto

主持人：我有点不太高兴，我当时还特别兴奋，结果一看是 SMB 税务工具，这就有点糟了。Host: and I got a little not happy about I was like I was so excited then it's like SMB tax tool that's rough.

嘉宾：现在，咱们把话都摊开说，对吧？Guest: now now all cards on the table right

主持人：你没有……我知道，嗯，现在告诉我那个。Host: you didn't I know yeah tell me that at the moment.

主持人：我知道，我知道，但你知道，我得一直保持一张特别开心的脸。谁知道呢。然后我觉得这件事特别好笑，你知道，整个故事是这样的：Ben Horowitz 给我发消息说，我发现了一个超棒的工具，叫 Town。它简直改变了我的人生。Host: I know I know but I want you know I have to maintain a very happy face at all times. you never know. and then this is what I find so funny about this is that you know this whole story. I get pinged by Ben Horowitz about like I found this amazing tool. It's called Town. It like changed my life.

太棒了。我当时就想，这很好，对吧？而且它还是个应用，所以自然归我的基金管。然后我又想，等等，那是让-德尼的公司，但他做的是中小企业税务。It's so great. And I'm like that's good, right? And it's like an app so therefore it falls under my fund. And I was like wait that's Jean-Denis company but he does SMB tax.

这完全说不通。我真的一头雾水。这就是我当时发给你的短信。然后你知道，接下来才过了一周，我们就成了合作伙伴，对此我兴奋极了。That doesn't make any sense. I'm so confused. And that's what I texted you. And then next thing, you know, a week later, we became partners, which I'm extremely excited about.

不过，也许可以先跟我们说说 Town 是做什么的。我想，大家都会非常感兴趣，想知道你们是如何从最初的故事一路走到今天的。But maybe tell us what town does, and I think it's going to be incredibly interesting for everybody how you got to this point from the origination story.

你离开 Plaid 后开始做 SMB Tax，能不能大致跟我们讲讲你作为创始人一路走来的历程，从那时到现在？It's like you left Plaid, you started doing SMB Tax, like kind of walk us through the founder’s journey from there to here.

嘉宾：我离开了 Plaid。因为我知道，如果我要创业，接下来一段时间就再也没有休假了，所以我和家人休息了几个月。对。然后我开始以一种非常 B2B 的方式探索：哪些市场会很有意思，AI 能在哪些市场真正改变产品体验。出于各种原因，税务领域很有道理：税务中有大量文本，而 LLM 很擅长处理文本；输入内容里也有很多结构化格式，比如财务报表和租赁文件。这感觉就是一个合适的领域，我们可以把准备企业纳税申报表这个流程……Guest: I left Plaid. I took a few months off with family because I knew that if I was going to be a founder, I was going to have no more time off for a while. yeah. and then started exploring in the very like B2B way what would be interesting markets where AI could really change the product experience and for a variety of reasons tax made a lot of sense there's a lot of text in tax and LLM are very good at text you deal with a lot of structured formats as inputs like financials and lease documents And it just felt like a medium where we could take this process of putting together a business tax return.

它和个人报税很不一样，而且要实现自动化。我做了工程师会做的事：我们进行了技术尽职调查，以证明这件事确实可行。It's pretty different from a personal tax return and automate it. And I did what engineers do which is we did technical due diligence to prove to ourselves that it could be done.

当时的感觉就是，没错，在接下来的两年里，小型到中型企业从整理财务数据和一堆业务相关文件，到完成报税，这整个流程都可以通过 AI 实现自动化。And the feeling was like yes within the next two years the process for a small to medium-sized business of going from you know your financials and a bunch of documents about your business and a finished tax return that could be automated with AI.

我们花了一年时间打造它。从产品角度来看，它确实行得通，但从市场推广的角度来看却不行。尽管我毫不怀疑报税工作终将实现自动化，但要如何高效触达数百万家企业，并把产品卖给它们呢？这件事比我们预想的要复杂得多，充满了各种未知数。We spent a year building it. It worked from a product perspective, but not from a go-to-market perspective. Even though I have no doubt that tax prep will be automated, how do you reach millions of businesses efficiently and sell that product? That had a lot more question marks than we anticipated.

一年之后，我们的业务表现不错——这是我对 AI 出现之前的评价。如果我把我们第一年的营收数字和营收增长情况告诉你——营收略低于一百万——再告诉你我们认为第二年能做到什么：营收达到两百五十万到三百万，那么在 AI 出现之前，你会觉得这完全合情合理。但在 AI 出现之后，这家公司不可能成长为一家达到风险投资规模的公司。After one year, we had what I would describe as a good business pre-AI. If I showed you the revenue number and revenue growth in our first year—a little below a million—and what we thought we could do in year two, two and a half to three million in revenue, pre-AI you would have said that makes a ton of sense. But post-AI, this was not going to be a venture-scale company.

更重要的是，我们意识到，现有行业巨头能利用这项技术为现有客户自动化报税，速度会比我们抢占市场份额更快。Even more importantly, we realized that the incumbents would be able to use the technology to automate tax prep for their existing customers faster than we could grab market share.

这对创始人来说是个关键点。你得意识到，作为新进入者，你的优势在于行动更快。你可以打造不同的产品，也可以采用不同的市场进入策略。但墙上的时钟一直在走：在那些拥有其他优势的老牌企业赶上来之前，你能多快真正建立起口碑传播带来的网络效应，并打入市场？And that's like a key thing if you're a founder. You have to think about it's your advantage if you're a new entrance is you're faster moving. You can build a different product. You can use different goto market approaches, but there's a ticking clock on the wall which is how quickly can you get real word of mouth network effects and market penetration before the incumbents who have other advantages.

他们有分销优势，对吧？比如说，在他们追上来并足够有效地复制你们的做法之前。至于税务产品，我们当时觉得，自己恐怕没法比竞争对手——那些老牌企业——更早做到数亿美元的营收，因为税务产品一年只能卖一次。They have distribution advantages, right? for example, before they can catch up and copy what you're doing effectively enough. And it felt for tax like we wouldn't be able to get to hundreds of millions of revenue before our competitors, the incumbents could because you can only sell tax once a year.

客人：嗯。Guest: Yeah.

主持人：而且那就像是，你知道，他们一年卖一次。就像是一种互动。它不是那种……它从根本上就不可能成为一个 DAU 工具。Host: And that's like a, you know, they sell it once a year. It's like the interaction. It's not like a It just fundamentally cannot be a DAU tool.

嘉宾：没错。而且它的口碑传播也不多，因为人们很少会炫耀自己的报税准备情况。即便他们会这么做，一年也只有一次，那就是报完税之后。所以，当你夸自己的报税体验有多好时，通常人们并不是在购买或寻找新的报税服务提供方。Guest: That's right. And it also doesn't have a ton of word of mouth because it is a rare it's rare for people to brag about their tax prep situation. And when they do, again, they can only do it once a year after they've done the tax return. And so when you when you brag about how good your tax prep experiences, usually is also not the time when people are purchasing like are looking for a new tax preparer account.

所以，他们会在明年忘记。And so they're going to forget in the next year.

嘉宾：没错。这些不连续性让它很难实现超大规模扩张。所以你知道，这作为一门生意并不是个好主意。有意思的是，我最好的朋友之一创办了一家成功的教育科技公司。Guest: That's right. Those discontinuity make it really difficult to hypers scale. And so that's why it was, you know, it was not a great idea as a business. And it's funny, one of my best friends has built like a successful edtech company.

而你对教育科技行业总会抱怨的一点，还是同一回事：一年里你只有两次销售机会。你可以在夏天为秋季学期销售，然后在秋冬季结束、新年到来之前，还有一个很短的销售窗口。这就是你真正能向学校和学区销售软件的仅有两次机会。他当时就说：“你知道，这确实限制了我实现超大规模扩张的能力，而我们做税务业务时，我选择把这一点忘掉了。”And one of the things you always complain about with edtech, it's the same thing. You can only sell in that tech twice a year. You can sell in the summer for the fall and then you have a short window where you can sell the end of the fall and winter season before before the new year. Those are the only two times where you can really sell software to schools and to school districts. and he was like, you know, that really limited my ability to hyperscale and I chose to forget that when we were doing tax.

离开一家运营良好的企业Walking away from a working business

所以，是的，我们做了报税业务。第一个报税季结束一年后，我和我的联合创始人基本上花了一周时间，喝着咖啡到处散步，认真思考人生、创业和资本主义的意义，最后决定应该做点别的——如果我们想影响数百万人，就得找到一个更好、前景更广阔的市场去开拓，实现这个目标还有更好的办法。于是我们就开始了。这是个相当勇敢的决定。大多数人可能不会这么做，尤其是因为当时这件事并不是做不下去。So yeah so we built tax and after one year after the first tax season we basically my my co-founder and I we you know went for a lot of walks with a lot of coffee for a week and really pondered the meaning of life and entrepreneurship and capitalism and decided we should do something else like we need to find a better a more fruitful market to play if we want to impact millions of people there are better ways to get at that goal and we started It was a pretty brave thing to do. Most people probably wouldn't do that especially because it wasn't not working

嘉宾：当时，那感觉就像失败了，就像我们正在失败。但我想，你创业的核心动力是什么，对吧？作为创始人，你总会遇到这样的时刻，而且出现得比你希望的更频繁；在那些时刻，你真的会问自己：我为什么要做这件事？Guest: in the moment. It felt like failure like we were failing. But I think you what are your core motivations for building a business right? You have to as a founder there are these moments they happen more often than you wish they did where you really ask yourself the question like why am I doing this?

而且对我们来说，产生影响真的非常非常重要。我们确实很想打造一些有意义的东西，帮助人们。后来我们不再相信自己能够对世界产生应有的那么大影响，因为我们觉得自己没法足够快地扩大业务规模。我认为我们创办公司的第二个原因，是我们真的很享受和团队一起工作。不过，我们团队里的每个人都有机会成本。他们本可以去 Town 工作，也可以去硅谷很多其他很棒的公司工作。And you know for us it was like impacting the world was really really important. We really wanted to build something that mattered and help people. and so we stopped believing that we could have as much impact in the world as we ought to have because we didn't feel like we could scale the business quickly enough. And the second reason why I think you build a company for us was really enjoy working with our team and but everyone on our team has an opportunity cost. They could be working at town or they could be working at, you know, a lot of other great companies in the valley.

所以，如果你不再相信自己能够取得很好的结果，那么每天走进办公室、看着别人的眼睛就会变得非常困难——尤其是当他们跟你说：“嘿，我在这件事上遇到了困难。”或者，当你试图说服一位候选人加入你的公司，而你知道，你知道，他们还拿到了别家公司一份可以兑现的 offer，这时你就会想：“哦，那我作为一个人又算什么呢？”就像，你知道，我必须相信……And so if you stop believing that you can have a great outcome, then it's really hard to come into the office every day and look at people in the eye when when they when they tell you like, "Hey, I'm having a hard time with this." Or when you're trying to convince a candidate to come join your company and you know, you know, they have an offer from someone else that's liquid and you know, you're like, "Oh, well, who am I as a human being?" Like, you know, I have to believe in

主持人：我知道是你付的钱。我当时就在那儿。Host: I know you're paying. I was there.

嘉宾：所以，你知道，我们看了几件事，然后就觉得，好吧，我们得做出决定。你知道，另一种想法是，也许我们本来能想出办法，而且总有一点是你永远无法确定，对吧？而且我们人类很有应变能力，所以总能再试试别的办法。但我们就是觉得，脑子里没有那个点子，没法把它做成一门真正具有突破性的生意。你知道，最难的是承认自己在别人面前失败了；而且对一些员工来说，可能也是这样——如果公司不做税务业务，那么我们的税务团队在公司里就不会有未来。Guest: So, you know, there's a few things that we looked at that and we were like, well, we got to make we got to make the decision. You know, the counter on the other side is maybe we would have figured a way and there's always this thing you never know for sure, right? You and we're very resourceful humans, so you can always try something else. But it just felt we didn't have the idea in our brain to make it a really breakthrough business. and you know, the hard part of it is admitting to other people that you failed and to some of your employees maybe like our tax team wasn't going to have a future if you're at the company if we weren't going to do tax.

面对这种情况，你会想：首先，谁在乎别人怎么看你？你知道，无论我成功还是失败，我的朋友都会一直是我的朋友。And you face that and you're like, first of all, who cares what other people think of you? You know, my friends will still be my friends regardless whether I succeed or fail.

对于员工，我们会提供帮助。我们可以帮他们找到下一份工作。你可以在遣散费和其他方面给予他们很好的待遇，让事情妥善解决。然后你会意识到，这个决定并不像你最初在情绪上反应的那样难以做出，而且它是正确的决定。你会逐渐坚定这个信念，然后就采取行动。最后再补充一点，因为税收是按年计算的。For employees, we'll help them. We can help them find their next gig. you can treat them really well in terms of severance and other things and make it okay and then you realize it's not as hard a decision as you might have emotionally reacted to initially and it's the right decision. You start to get that conviction and then you just do it. One last little bit is because tax is annual.

我觉得，在那个时间点做出决定，是我们唯一能做决定的时机。我们不可能——你不能在4月16日，在已经告诉一大堆人你会帮他们报税之后再转向。你也不能在1月，在已经和一半的合作伙伴签约之后再转向，对吧？我们当时有一个窗口期，大概从10月15日左右开始，可能有一个月的时间，我们可以同时生活在两个世界里。I think making the decision at that point in time it was the only time we could make the decision. We couldn't you can't pivot like April 16th after you've told a bunch of people that you're going to do their tax return. You can't pivot in January after you've signed half of your partners, right? There was we had a window between let's say like right around October 15th of probably a month where we could live in both universes.

我们继续做税务工作的那个世界，以及我们无法继续做税务工作的那个世界，而在那之后，机会之门就要关上了。所以我认为，这种时间压力帮助我们比其他情况下更高效地做出了决定。我认为，如果你身处一个持续性的行业——如果你不在一个周期性行业里——你总可以告诉自己：好吧，让我再试试下一个想法，一个月后再说。让我再试试接下来三周要做的事。The universe where we kept doing tax and the universe where we couldn't and after that the door was closing. And so I think that time pressure helped us make the decision more efficiently than than otherwise. I think if you're in a continuous, if you're not in a cyclical business, I think you can always tell yourself, well, let me try the next idea for a month. Let me try the next thing for the next 3 weeks.

也许那样行得通。也许这样行得通。我们曾有过一个很短的窗口期，对吧？那段时间里，我们或许还能改变方向。可窗口期一过，就变成了：嘿，我们现在就得做决定。Maybe that'll work. Maybe this will work. We had a short window, right, where we could like change the direction potentially. And once the window was gone, it was like, hey, we have to decide right now.

不然一年后我们还会停留在原地。而到那时，我们就没有资金来做出改变了。This is otherwise we're going to be here a year from now. And a year from now, we won't have the capital to make the change.

主持人：所以从那以后，显然这个名字没有改变。它仍然叫 Town。Host: so from there to obviously the name didn't change. It's still town.

主持人：这是个不错的领域。这确实是个非常不错的领域。不过，你是如何从那时走到今天这一步的？Host: It's a good domain. It's a it's a very good domain. but how did you get from there to where you are right now?

Town 的诞生How Town was born

嘉宾：我们基本上相当认真地探索了四个想法，没必要把这四个都讲一遍。后来发展成 Town 的想法，源于一个问题：为什么还没有人打造出一个能通过电子邮件和日历运行的优秀智能代理？我们开始思考这个问题，首先是因为我们在开发税务产品时，很多客户都对我们说：“嘿，你们自动化处理税务，真是太棒了。”但我也花了很多时间安排和客户的会议。等我参加会议时，我想……或者说，我的客户参加会议时，会忘记会议是要谈什么的。Guest: We basically explored about four ideas ser pretty seriously and it's not worth going all four. What led us to what became town was this question which is why has no one built a great agent that works out of email and calendar. And we started asking that question one because when we're building the tax product, a lot of customers were telling us like, "Hey, it's amazing that you're automating tax." But I also spent a lot of time setting up setting up meetings with my customers. When I go into the meetings, I'm trying to or my clients when I go into the meetings, I forget what the meeting was about.

客户总是问我同样的税务问题。要是你能提前帮我起草好答案，那该多棒啊！正是这些需求让我们意识到，这些事情其实并不复杂，但一直没有人针对知识工作者常见的工作流程打造出优秀的 AI，比如开会、会前准备、会议成果、回复那些经常出现的非常非常简单的邮件，以及帮助人们为一天的工作做好准备。Clients always ask me the same tax questions. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could pre-draft answers for me? And so we realized from these needs that like these weren't very complicated things to do, but no one had built great AI around these very common knowledge worker workflows like meetings, meeting prep, meeting outcome, answering pretty pretty simple emails that happen all the time, getting people to be prepared for their day.

所以我们刚开始探索这个想法时，正值 Opus45 发布。那时候，至少在编程领域，智能体已经能承担越来越多的自主工作。我想，正是这个简单的洞见，加上模型突然变得更具智能体能力，让我们很快就找到了产品与市场的契合点。你知道，项目与市场的契合是一件很神奇的事；一旦拥有了它，你就会拼命想抓住不放，不断沿着这条线索追下去，永远不停。所以，我们并没有停下来——实际上，我们也没有退一步问自己：TAM 能有多大？是不是所有人都想做这件事？或者，赢意味着什么？So we just started exploring that idea and we did it at the time that Opus45 was happening and agents at least for coding were able to do more and more autonomous work and I would say that very simple insight plus the model suddenly being able to be more agentic meant that we got product market fit very quickly and you know project market fit is a it's a magical thing once you once you have it you kind of want to hang on for dear life and keep pulling at at the string forever and ever. So, we didn't sit we didn't actually sit back and ask ourselves like how big could the TAM be or like will everyone want to do this or you know like what does it mean to win?

我们当时就想，嘿，用户的需求非常旺盛。接下来几个月，我们要全力投入，深入了解市场，看看这个机会究竟会是什么样子。We were just like hey we're getting a ton of pull from users. Let's go after this for a few months really hard and learn about the market and see what the opportunity could look like.

而且你知道，我们做着做着就开始意识到，大多数企业的业务都靠邮件和日历来运转，对吧？尤其是企业里那些对外的岗位，比如销售、业务拓展或招聘。你知道，公司之间大多是通过邮件协作的。所以我们就想，哦，目标市场肯定很大，而且不只是在美国，而是遍布全球。后来，当客户开始告诉我们他们喜欢产品的哪些地方时，我们才意识到，哦，他们希望我们帮忙解决的问题其实很有深度。事情并不像把一个大语言模型接到邮箱上那么简单。And you know as we did it we started you know we start to realize well most businesses run out of email on their calendar right especially any any role at a business that's external that's like sales or business development or recruiting you know the way companies work together is through email mostly so we're like oh the TAM's got to be big and it's not just in the US it's like everywhere in the world and then we start like when our customers start telling us what they liked about the product we realized oh there's depth to what they're asking us to solve for them. It's not this isn't as simple as just hooking up an LLM to your email.

要让这种体验变得越来越好，需要做的事情还有很多。所以，我们开始觉得，在产品层面，我并不是说我们一定已经看到了表情功能的明确方向，但其中的复杂性已经足够高，让我们觉得：嘿，我们完全可以深入探索，打造出色的产品体验。There's a lot more that goes into making this experience better and better. So, we started feeling like on the product end, I'm not saying necessarily we had line of sight to emote, but there was enough complexity that we thought, hey, we could really dig into this and build a great product experience.

基本上，我们从去年12月一直做到4月。我们每天都在坚持，产品每天增长百分之一或百分之一点五，客户也不断向我们提出更多需求，产品路线图也非常清晰。你知道，事情就这样一步步把我们推到了那个节点：我们说，嘿，封闭测试到此为止吧，我们已经准备好把产品推向全世界了。And basically, we did that from December of last year until April. And we just kept going every day like every day the product grew by a percent or a percent and a half and our customers kept asking us for more and the roadmap was very clear and you know we got pulled until the point we were like hey enough with this closed beta like we're ready to launch the product out into the world

主持人：我觉得你们做得非常大胆的一点是，你们已经实现了产品市场契合度，但我们也聊过很多次，你们到底要不要走 PLG 路线，对吧？还是说，面对那些大公司，他们会说：“嘿，把你们的产品给我，我要用。”但你们逐渐意识到，客户并不是用户：客户是开支票的人，而用户才是那个必须与产品打交道的人。Host: and one of the things that I thought was very bold about what you did as well. so you have product market fit, but you're also, we talked about this a lot of do you go PLG, right? Or do you go like you have big companies that say, "Hey, give me your product. I want it." But you kind of realized that if the customer is not the user, the customer is the person that writes the check. The user is the person that has to deal with the product.

如果客户不是用户，你可能最终会做出糟糕的产品，因为你是在让 CISO 满意。你是在让……你实际上并没有让用户满意。你是在让客户满意。If the customer is not the user, you might end up building a bad product because you're making the CISO happy. You're making you're not actually making the user happy. You're making the customer happy.

嘉宾：是的，我们——我和我的联合创始人都曾在 Dropbox 工作。我认为我们从 Dropbox 学到的一大经验是，你总能把世界级的产品体验转化为适用于企业的体验。朝这个方向走其实很容易。我的意思是，让我换个说法：朝这个方向走很难，但这是有可能的。Guest: Yeah, we my co-founder I worked at Dropbox and I think one of the big learnings for us from Dropbox is you can always take a worldclass product experience and figure out how it works for the enterprise. It's really easy to go in that direction. I mean, let me rephrase that. It's tough to go in that direction, but it is possible.

如果以此为基准，想从满足合规、IT 和企业需求的体验出发，再设法打造出色的产品体验，几乎是不可能的。因此，我们当时觉得——我想直到现在，大概几个月前为止，我们都觉得——仅仅是把产品做好，就有巨大的潜力，这应该是我们的重点；增长自然会发生。我们想的是，只要我们能把产品体验做好，而且从企业角度、数据安全和隐私角度来看，我们的基础足够扎实，之后再想办法把产品的管理端打磨到完全满足企业需求就行了。It is almost impossible to go from an experience that starts from the compliance IT enterprise requirements and then figures out how to make the product experience incredible. if you take that as the baseline. So we felt and I think until now until maybe a couple months ago we felt like there was so much alpha in just making the product better that should be our focus growth was just happening naturally. We're like, if we figure out the product experience and if our foundation from an enterprise perspective, from a data security and privacy perspective is good, we can figure out later how we shape the admin side of the product to be perfect for an enterprise.

我觉得这对我们来说是正确的选择。你知道，尤其是作为消费者，人们对 AI 能做什么的期待，最终会体现在面向消费者的体验上。我们的判断是，公司的 CIO 和 CEO 会对自己说：“嘿，我在个人生活中享受到这种出色的个人助理体验，也希望公司里能有这样的体验。”所以，谁能提供让人感觉像消费级产品一样的企业级体验，谁就更有机会胜出。And I think that was the right call for us. Like I think you know especially as consumers expectations around what AI can do it like those are going to be consumer grade experiences. And so our thesis is that CIOS, CEOs of companies are going to tell themselves, hey, this amazing personal assistant experience that I get on the personal side of the world, I want that for my company. And so whoever has an enterprise experience that feels like a consumer experience, like they're going to be set up to win.

我们当时就觉得，这就是我们希望公司达到的位置。我认为我们基本上确实做到了。现在的问题是，我们已经有大型公司在使用这款产品。那么，我们该如何从只有一笔企业级交易，发展到能够有效地达成几十笔交易呢？And we were like, that's where we want to be as a as a business. And I think I think we've mostly actually succeeded in getting there. Now it's now the question is okay like you know we first we have like large companies that are using the product. So you know it's like how do we go from just like one enterprise deal to like being able to dozens effectively.

我们如何满足数据隐私和安全方面的要求？不只是满足几个客户的要求，而是，你知道，如何满足每一家企业的要求？现在这感觉像是一个更明确、更容易把握的问题，我们可以全心投入去解决，因为核心产品体验很好。How do we take the data privacy security requirements of not just like a couple of customers but you know how do we satisfy those for every enterprise company? that feels like a much more knowable problem now and we can go after that with our heart out because the core product experience is good.

AI 职场应用的 iPhone 时刻The iPhone moment for AI at work

主持人：是啊。不，我同意。我知道你和我之前也稍微聊过这件事，我记得我曾经有一部 BlackBerry。Host: Yeah. No, I agreed. And I know you and I have talked about this a bit where I remember having a Blackberry

主持人：2007 年，iPhone 发布了，随后史蒂夫·鲍尔默就说：“没人会买一部 800 美元的手机。这东西肯定会失败，简直是个笑话。”诸如此类。你知道，后来微软收购了诺基亚。Host: In 2007, the iPhone launches and then Steve Balmer's like, "Nobody's going to buy an $800 phone. This is going to be a flop. It's such a joke." Blah blah blah. You know, eventually Microsoft buys Nokia.

但黑莓很快就没落了，因为我对此至少有个理论：那一年，每位 CEO 圣诞节都收到了一部 iPhone，或者类似的东西，然后用它给孩子拍照。他们会说：“我去，这拍得真不错。”But the Blackberry died pretty quickly because my theory on this at least is that every CEO got an iPhone for Christmas that year or something was taking pictures of their kids. They're like, "Holy crap, this is really good.

主持人：这东西不怎么样。嘿，我才是老板。你去想办法让这东西在这儿运转起来。"}Host: This thing's not that good. Hey, I'm the boss. You go figure out how to make this thing work here."

嘉宾：是的。Guest: Yeah.

主持人：没错。而且我大概……我跟很多企业领导者聊过，很有意思的是，那些已经看到未来的人会说：“我需要这个。”还有些人会说：“哦，是啊，人工智能没那么好用。我用沃森之类的。”怀疑的人还是不少。Host: Right. And we're probably I talked to a lot of enterprise leaders and it's funny the ones that have seen the future are like, I need this. There are some that are like, "Oh yeah, like AI doesn't work that well. I use Watson or something." Like there are still plenty of those where they're skeptics.

不过我觉得，iPhone 的出现似乎让人们在个性化场景中领略到了 AI 的种种神奇之处，但在工作场景中还没有。至于为什么会这样，目前仍是个悬而未决的问题。部分原因在于权限管理。但我很想听听你的看法：你是否认同这种说法？以及未来几年，AI 在工作中的应用会是什么样子？But like it feels like the iPhone has emerged in terms of like people have been exposed to the wonders of AI in a personalized setting but not in a work setting. And it's kind of an open question as to why. And part of it is the permissioning part of it. But I'd love for your thoughts on kind of if you agree with that framing and kind of what the next few years of like AI for work look like.

嘉宾：是的。第一点，我认同这种表述框架。顺便提一句，有这么一家公司，我记得它叫 Good。Guest: Yeah. So one, I agree with the framing. I think a little side note, there was this company, I believe it was called Good.

主持人：是的。不错的技术。Host: Yeah. Good technologies.

嘉宾：是的。它是一个适用于 iPhone、满足企业级需求的电子邮件客户端。Guest: Yeah. Which was it was an enterprise ready email client for the iPhone.

主持人：是的。那是个应用程序。简直是有史以来最丑的东西。没错。Host: Yeah. It was an app. It was like the ugliest thing in the history of the world. Yes.

我以前用过它。I used to use it.

嘉宾：我觉得这不只是一个黑莓的故事。我不想成为 Good，对吧？Good 最终没能成为一家成功的企业，因为人们会说：“没错，你们是在 iPhone 上面向企业用户，但你们的质量达不到其他 iPhone 应用的水平。”这就是我们的风险：我们不仅可能成为黑莓，也可能成为 Good，而不是让人们在 iPhone 上使用 Gmail 应用。企业既看重便利性，也看重企业级功能。Guest: I think it’s not just a BlackBerry story. I don’t want to be Good, right? Good eventually was not a good business because people said, “Sure, you’re enterprise on the iPhone, but you’re not at the level of quality of every other iPhone app.” That’s the risk for us: not just being the BlackBerry, but also being Good, rather than people using the Gmail app on their iPhone. A business cares about both convenience and enterprise features.

我经常思考那些以人的节奏发生的事情。如今，全球有几百万人在使用助手这一类产品。它仍处于普及曲线的早期阶段，所以我认为，并不是所有 CEO 都已经开始使用了。就像 iPhone 一样，大多数人可能还需要 6 个月、12 个月或 18 个月，才能在个人生活中体验到这种神奇之处。I often think about things that happen at the speed of a human. Assistants as a category are used by a few million people worldwide today. It’s still very early in the adoption curve, so I don’t think all the CEOs have gone there. Just like the iPhone, it will probably take 6, 12, or 18 months for most people to experience this magic even in their personal life.

一旦他们做到了，接下来就要考虑如何在公司内部采用这项技术。我认为这比 iPhone 的情况要复杂，因为智能体的工作方式是：它们会变得越来越高效。如果它们能够访问支撑你们业务的数据和 API，并且能以安全、保护隐私的方式访问这些内容，那么它们就能为你做很多事情。但如果它们无法访问，对吧，那它们的聪明程度实际上也就取决于它们能够访问的数据。Once they do, then there's the question is how do you adopt that within the company? And I think it is more complicated than just the iPhone because the way agents work is they're more and more effective. If they have access to the data and the APIs that run your business, if they have access to those things in a secure, privacy preserving way, then they can do lots of things for you. But if they don't, right, they're they're only really as smart as the data they have the access to.

所以，我觉得我们对这一历程的设想是，首先要能走进任何一家公司，只需连接几位员工的电子邮件和日历，就能让他们用起来。暂时还不需要接入核心记录系统，就能让他们感受到足够的神奇效果，让他们觉得：“哦，这会给我的工作带来很大的价值。”So, you know, I think the way we think about the journey is first be able to go to any company and get a few people at that business simply by connecting their email and their calendar. So, not the core systems of record yet to feel enough magic that they're like, "Oh, this is going to bring a lot of mal value in my work."

正如我所说，对于需要对外沟通的岗位，日历和电子邮件能让你深入了解如何将某人工作中的一部分自动化。这样你就可以让助手参与进来。你可以这样说：“我可以帮你为这些会议做好准备。我可以调整这次会议的演示文稿，让它更好地运用设计语言，并更新为这份发给你的 PDF 中的最新数据。”And as I said, for external facing roles, the calendar and email are real sources of insight about how you can automate part of someone's work. And so then you can show up with the assistant. You can be like, I can help prepare you for these meetings. I can tweak the decks for that meeting to use the design language better and to be updated with the latest numbers that are in this in this PDF that was sent to you.

仅凭这一点，人们就会开始感受到它的神奇之处。然后你会问自己：我是否已经赢得了让你连接 CRM 的资格？我是否已经赢得了让你去找 IT 团队、请求接入所有这些其他工具的资格？我认为，这个过程会更多地按照人类的节奏展开。And just from that, people will start to feel the magic. And then you ask yourself, well, have I earned the right to ask you to connect your CRM? Have I earned the right for you to go to your IT team and ask all these other tools to be connected? And I think that journey will happen more at the speed of humans.

你也必须看到事情的另一面。And you have to have the other side of the coin.

必须具备审计日志，还必须采取相应的安全措施，确保特权信息不会共享给代理。所有这些都不可或缺。还需要为 CFO 提供成本控制，让他们明白，如果整个团队都在平台上开展工作，就能了解资金花在了哪里，并确保令牌得到高效使用。You have to have the audit logs. You have to have the posture that allows, you know, privilege information not to be shared with the agent. You need all these. You need the cost control for the CFO so that they understand that if their whole team operates on town, they're understanding where money is being spent and that tokens are being used efficiently.

所以没错，这些方面都需要投入更多人力和时间来适应，因为你仍然是在向一家《财富》100强企业销售产品，而这类公司必须以一定程度的审慎来运营。随着你转向规模较小的市场，开始面向中小企业和中端市场公司，我认为这类要求会少一些，对吧？因此，采用速度会快得多。我们目前的押注是：在产品体验和自助式增长方面，我们重点关注中小企业和中端市场；在安全、合规和财务功能方面，则重点关注企业级市场。我们认为可以拿下这个领域的整个市场。So that right, it's all that side of things that will take more human time to adapt because you're still selling into, you know, a Fortune 100 company that has to be run with a certain level of diligence. As you move down market, right, as you move towards SMBs and mid-market firms, I think you have fewer of those requirements, right? And the adoption will be much faster. And so our current bet right now is we are really focusing on from a product experience and self-s serve growth the SMB market the mid-market and then from a what security compliance finance features do we need focusing on the enterprise and we think we can knock out that whole part of the space.

主持人：嗯，我是说，我觉得如果你仔细想想，整个助理领域也存在杰文斯悖论。比如，我这里有一位行政助理。不过话虽如此，我不是……我是说，我信任她，也喜欢她，但我不想让她读我所有的邮件。其实，我们刚才还谈到了这件事。Host: Yeah I mean I think there's also a Jevons paradox to this whole assistant space if you think about it right. So, I have an executive assistant here. but still, I don't I mean, I trust her. I like her. I don't want her reading all of my email. and actually, this just came up.

我当时在伦敦，以为自己有个晚宴要参加。我敢肯定，我好像收到过一封相关邮件。我给我老乡 Snap 发短信，问：“我不是有个晚宴要参加吗？”然后对方就说：“是啊，你是有。没错。”I was in London. I thought I had a dinner to go to. So, I could have sworn like I got an email about it. I texted Snap, my towny, and I was like, "Don't I have a dinner to go to?" And it like it was like, "Yes, you do. you do."

嘉宾：而且这事也没写在你的日历上。Guest: And it wasn't on your calendar.

主持人：这件事不在我的日程安排里。这是我的错，不是我助理的错。这是我的错，因为我没有回复邮件。他们没有抄送她。这不是他们的错，是我的错。Host: It was not on my calendar. It was my fault, not my assistant's fault. it was my fault because I didn't respond to an email. they didn't CC her. That's not their fault. That's my fault.

嘉宾：而且它识别到了。但现在它会自动处理，就像一直在读取我的电子邮件一样。Guest: And it caught it. But now I have it automatically going through like it reads my email all the time.

主持人：嗯。Host: Mh.

主持人：我的公司很贴心，给我配了一名行政助理。很多人都没有助理。你可能会说，行政助理的市场相当小，因为大多数人都没有。但如果能通过硅基技术来提供这类服务，市场就相当大了。接着你就会想到一些可以做的事，比如让某个人一直替你读邮件——从隐私角度来说，我以前绝不会这么做。Host: My firm is nice enough to give me an executive assistant. There are plenty of people who don’t have one. You might say that the market for executive assistants is rather small because most people don’t have them. But if you could produce it via silicon, the market is quite large. Then you find things to do, like having somebody read your email all the time, which I would never have done before from a privacy perspective.

这就像是双重杰文斯悖论，其中一重与隐私有关。对于不了解的人来说，杰文斯悖论探讨的是：蒸汽机变得更高效时——詹姆斯·瓦特造出了效率更高的蒸汽机——人们原以为煤炭需求会下降。过去需要一磅煤才能完成的事，现在只需一盎司。但结果是，需求增长了一千倍，因为现在有了能非常高效地做到这件事的东西。It’s like a twofold Jevons paradox, including one around privacy. For those who don’t know, Jevons paradox concerns how, when the steam engine became more efficient—James Watt made a more efficient steam engine—the assumption was that demand for coal would go down. What used to take a pound of coal now took an ounce. But it turned out that demand went up a thousandfold because now you had something that could do it very efficiently.

所以感觉这大概是面向那个……你知道，助手市场的，但我想知道你们怎么界定、怎么定义自己的市场？是助手市场吗？因为那样似乎把范围划得太窄了。So it feels like that probably exists for the you know assistant market but I'm wondering how do you declare how do you how do you define your market? Is it like assistant because that seems like it cast too too narrow of a brush on it.

城镇：一台代币分配机器Town as a token-allocation machine

我认为，我们看待市场的方式是：我们正在尝试打造一款产品，与人们合作，为他们寻找越来越多的机会，让他们能够部署 AI，从而把工作做得更好。在某些情况下，我认为我们的产品就像一台 Token 分配机器。我们想为人们提供选项，让他们决定可以在哪些地方使用 Token；然后由人来选择是否接受由此带来的结果。我认为，随着 Token 越来越便宜，会有越来越多的地方适合使用 Token，而在如今 Token 价格昂贵的情况下，你根本不会考虑在这些地方使用它们。I think of the market as we're trying to build a product that works with people to find more and more opportunities for them to deploy AI to be better at their job. And I think in some case so I think of our of our product as a token allocation machine. We're trying to give options to the human about where they could apply tokens and then we choose the human can choose whether they want the outcome of that. And I think as the tokens get cheaper, there are more and more places where you would apply tokens where you would never have done it with today's expensive tokens.

而且以前你肯定不会让人来做这件事。最基础的例子就是，为你要参加的每场会议撰写会前准备笔记。即使你有行政助理，助理也不会为你参加的每场会议、每个30分钟时段都花时间写出完美的会前准备笔记。And you definitely would not have done it with humans before. So like the very very basic example is writing prep notes for every meeting that you walk into. Even if you have an EA, your EA is not spending for every meeting, every 30 minute that you go into writing perfect prep notes.

这根本不是对时间的有效利用。但 LLM 可以用几乎不花钱的成本做到，对吧？所以突然之间，任何人都可以为每场会议准备好会前笔记，了解还有谁会参加这场会议，以及他们过去一周有没有在 X 上说过什么可能与会议相关的内容。诸如此类的长尾研究，现在都值得做了，因为成本低了太多。It's just not a good use of time. But an LLM can do that for I don't know a penny, right? And so then suddenly for anybody feeling like you have prep notes for every meeting that does some research on who else is in that meeting, have they said anything in X in the last week that might be relevant for the meeting. Like all this longtail research is now worth it because it's so much cheaper.

所以我们的工作就是不断找到更多类似的情况，然后告诉你这位用户：“嘿，要不要我们帮你处理？”我再举一个最近让我特别着迷的例子。假设你是一位小企业主，在美国经营一家餐馆。你的批发商——也就是向你供应农产品及其他餐馆制作食物所需物品的商家——大概每个月，或者每季度，会给你发一封邮件，附上一份 Excel 表格或 PDF，列出他们所有库存商品的价格。So our job is to find things that look like that more and more and to tell you as the user, hey, do you want us to do that for you? So, I give you like another example that I'm recently pretty infatuated with. It's like if you are a small business owner and you run a restaurant in America, your wholesalers, that is the people that you buy the produce and other things that go into making food at your restaurant, they email you probably once a month, maybe once a quarter with an Excel spreadsheet or a PDF of the prices for all their inventory.

所以大概有几千种，甚至上万种商品，价格还总是在变。如果你是餐馆老板，手下有个兼职财务人员，那这个人应该每季度帮你看看价格都发生了哪些变化，看看能不能从别的批发商那里订购一些东西，免得你可能被宰了，或者因为某样东西涨价了20%或30%而付了太多钱。可大多数时候你不会这么做，因为这种情况不常见，而且尽管这么做可能省钱，却特别麻烦。So like thousands, if not 10 thousands of items. And the prices are always changing. And if you're a restaurant owner and you have a finance person part-time, what that person should do for you is once a quarter, look at how the prices have changed to see if you could order some things from different wholesalers to see if you're maybe getting ripped off or paying too much because the price of something has gone up 20 or 30%. Mostly you don't do it because it's like a rare thing and even though it could save you money, it's a pain in the ass.

这不是你们日常运营的一部分。你们也没有专职人员来做这件事。对一个城镇来说，可以让某个工具每月运行一次并进行分析。说真的，你只要通过提示词，就能在五分钟内把它搭出来供自己使用。It's not part of your operations. You don't have a full-time person to do it. With a town, having a thing run once a month and do the analysis. Like literally, you can prompt your way to having that exist for you in five minutes.

如果它一年12个月里有11个月都找不到值得做的事，那运行这玩意儿每月也就花你一美元左右。And if it finds nothing 11 out of 12 months that's worth doing, it's going to cost you like a dollar a month to run that thing.

但有意思的是，一年里只要有一个月它能找到点东西，就能帮你找到几百甚至上千美元。对吧？But the interesting thing is the one month out of a year where it finds something, it's going to find like hundreds if not thousands of dollars for you. Right.

主持人：对。Host: Right.

嘉宾：所以，这件事可能值得做，也可能不值得做，但你至少应该每个月做一次。菜单一有变动，你就应该做一次。要是你的批发商每天都改价，也许你就该每天做一次。不过这种情况不会发生。你知道，我们的工作是让餐馆老板看到这个机会，因为他们不这么做，并不是因为他们不够聪明，或者不了解自己的生意。Guest: And so now this thing that may or may not have been worth it, you should do it at least once a month. You should do it whenever there's a change to the you maybe you should do it daily if you have a wholesaler that changed prices daily. That doesn't happen. But you know, our job though is to show that opportunity to the restaurant owner because they won't it's not that they aren't very smart or don't understand their business very well.

他们会的。他们不会觉得这有什么价值。所以，不过你多少还是想跟他们说：“听着，你想让我确保你的批发商不会以损害你业务的方式随意调价吗？”当然，那就这么做吧。They do. They're not going to think that's valuable. So, but you kind of want to tell them like, "Hey, listen. You want me to always make sure that your wholesalers aren't changing prices in a way that's negative for your business?" Sure, do that.

你其实并不太在意它运行得有多频繁。你在意的是偶尔会收到一封邮件，告诉你：“嘿，你可能应该把这些东西都转到另一家批发商那里。”You don't really care actually after how often it runs. What you care about is once in a while you get an email that tells you like, "Hey, you should probably move all these things to this other wholesaler.

他们有折扣，或者像这个一样，真的在给这些东西涨价，结果变得有点太贵了。也许你应该把这些菜单项删掉。”这又不是什么高深的事，对吧？但你得有一个产品能告诉你这件事是可行的，让它……你懂的，They have a discount or like this one is really raising prices on these things and it's getting a little too expensive. Maybe you should remove those menu items." like it's not rocket science to do this, right? but you have to have a product that tells you that this thing is possible that makes it, you know,

主持人：嗯，那个例子里有意思的地方在于，如果你去问一家餐馆的老板：“你想要一位行政助理吗？”他们大概会说：“你在说什么呢？”Host: well the interesting point around that example is if you went to a restaurant owner and said, "Do you want an executive assistant?" They'd be like, "What are you talking about?"

来宾：我不知道。是啊。是啊。Guest: I have no idea. Yeah. Yeah.

主持人：而如果你说：“你想省钱吗？”那就像 Geico，对吧？就像：“你想买车时省下 15% 吗？”又或者：“你想买冰山生菜时省点钱吗？我每年能帮你省 500 美元，而且每年只收你 5 美元？”答案当然是肯定的。但你怎么知道——我是说，这算是产品营销方面的问题，还是……因为我记得我们第一次聊这件事时，谈到了业务在税务之后的新方向，或者说未来方向，以及 PLG 和销售驱动增长之间的区别。你说的话让我印象很深：如果你想打造一款以用户为中心的产品，就必须为用户打造，而不是为那些——你懂的——公司的高层和公司里所有的律师打造。之后，你可以反过来逐步拓展到企业销售和销售驱动增长。但另一件事是这种横向与纵向的区别。Host: Whereas if you said, "Do you want to save?" It's it's like Geico, right? It's like, "Do you want to save 15% on your car?" Like, "Do you want to save money on iceberg lettuce and I can save you $500 a year and charge you $5 a year?" The answer is yes. But how do you know I mean this is kind of the product marketing question or ch because I remember the two things that we talked about when we first talked about this the new direction or the future direction of the business post tax where PLG versus salesled growth where what you said really stuck with me it's like if you want to build a product that is designed for the user you have to build it for the user not for this you know the corporate overlords all the lawyers at the company and eventually you can work your way backwards into into enterprise sales and salesled growth but the other thing is this kind of horiz horizontal versus vertical.

这也是很多公司都非常纠结的问题。实际上，这也会把我们带到另一个话题：你怎么看那些大公司？比如 Anthropic、OpenAI，以及其他同时为企业和消费者开发产品的公司。你当时是怎么思考通用型与垂直型的？And this is a this is a question that a lot of companies struggle with a lot. And this kind of actually will bring us to a different point on like what do you think about the big guys, right? Like obviously like Anthropic and Open AI OpenAI and everybody else who's kind of building things both for enterprise and for consumer. How do you how did you kind of think about horizontal versus vertical?

因为你刚才说的——希望我没理解错——是我们一开始会尽可能做得横向一些，因为我们不想变成那种……你知道，我们不想被局限在某个可能非常……我们不想被局限住，也不想被打上“帮你省冰山生菜钱的公司”这样的标签。我们想做这件事，也会边做边学习。顺便说一句，这就是我现在对你那些候选人的推销词。Because what you said, hopefully I'm going to capture it correctly was we're going to start off as horizontal as possible because we don't want to be like, you know, we don't want to be siloed into like something that might be very we don't want to be siloed and branded as like the save you money on iceberg lettuce company. We want to do that and we're going to learn. This is my sales pitch to your candidates by the way now.

所以，希望我理解得没错。我们会从成千上万、甚至数以万计使用我们产品的企业和个人那里学习，然后最终再从那里开始垂直化，因为我们会让市场来定义方向。我们不会，也不会自以为了解“冰山生菜问题”。只有等有人真正下载 Town、使用 Town，并从他们的 Towny 身上学到东西之后，我们才能意识到这可以成为一个垂直领域。So hopefully I'm getting this right. We're going to learn from hopefully thousands, tens of thousands of businesses and people that use our product and then eventually we can verticalize from there because we're going to let the market define that. And we're not going to we're not going to presume that we know about the iceberg lettuce problem. We wouldn't know that until somebody actually downloads town, uses town, they learn from their towny and then we can actually recognize that can be a vertical.

不过我想问，你怎么看垂直和水平？But I guess how do you think about vertical versus horizontal?

水平与垂直Horizontal vs vertical

所以，我对如今大多数 AI 产品的看法是，它们的能力会非常相似。也就是说，在工作场景中，大多数工具框架都能做同样的事情。因此，我认为，长期以来硅谷的主要差异化优势——也就是拥有领先于市场的不同产品功能——将越来越难以维持。这个话题我们可以先暂且搁置，不过我觉得我们可以就一个有意思的问题展开讨论：软件的价值单位已经从应用变成了电脑。So the way I think about most AI products today is that the capabilities will be very similar. Meaning most harnesses in the work context will be able to do the same things. And so the differentiator like I think what has been the main differentiator in Silicon Valley for a long time which is you have different product features that are ahead of market. It's going to be more and more difficult to sustain that kind of an advantage. and we can we'll put a pin in this one, but we can have an interesting conversation about I think the unit of value in software has changed from the app to the computer.

但这真正意味着的是，它已经从一个应用扩展到了人类能做的任何事情。而人几乎可以用电脑做任何事。所以我们彻底抽象掉了应用层。我认为应用层的价值会下降。But what that really means, it's gone from an app to anything that a human can do. And a human can do almost anything with a computer. So we're abstracting away the app layer totally. And I think the value will drop in the app layer.

那么，如果各家的能力并没有什么不同，要怎样才能打造一家成功的公司呢？我认为我们的看法是，随着 AI 变得越来越强，它就能更好地为每位用户量身定制产品，精准满足他们的需求。也就是说，如果你是一名电工，注册并开始使用 Town，在引导流程中，我们向你推荐的可自动化事项会非常贴合电工的工作；而如果你是一名风险投资家，推荐的内容就会非常贴合风险投资家的工作。So if the capabilities aren't different, then how do you build a successful company? And I think our take on that is we are betting that as AI gets better, it can better customize the product for each user like very specifically to their need. Meaning if you're an electrician that signs up for town and you're onboarding, the things we recommend to you that we can automate are very specific to electricians. And if you're a venture capitalist, they're very specific to a venture capitalist.

如果你是 EA，那它针对的就是该行业里的 EA，诸如此类。那么该怎么做呢？模型目前还不够好，没法在你只是问它“嘿，给身为风投的 Alex 推荐一些可以用 town 自动化的事情”时，就给出特别深入的建议。我觉得它能给出一些不错的、比较表层的建议，但还不够深入。And if you're an EA, it's specific to an EA in that industry and so on and so forth. And so how do you do that? Well, the models aren't yet good enough where when you just ask the model, hey, recommend for Alex who's a VC, things that you could automate with town, I think you get pretty good surface level suggestions, but not really deep ones.

嘉宾：所以，我们的做法是——因为我们不会查看用户数据，对吧？企业级就绪的一部分要求就是不能查看用户数据，对吧？所以，我们会看汇总指标，了解目前平台上的重度用户是谁，然后去和他们交流。交流时，他们会告诉我们自己自动化了哪些事情。比如，我们可能会和 10 位经营餐馆的重度用户聊聊，之后发现他们有五件事都在做。然后，我们会在内部讨论，为餐馆老板开发一些原型自动化流程，我们称之为 routines，并且认为这些流程非常实用，比如那个关于批发商的流程。我们会以此为起点，对吧？Guest: So what we do and because we don't look at user data, right? Like part of being enterprise ready is you can't look at user data, right? So what we do is we look at aggregate metrics of which who are our power users on the platform today and then we go talk to them and when we talk to them they tell us the kinds of things they've automated and so we might talk to 10 power users that run restaurants and what we'll see when we talk to that there's five things in common that they all do and then we'll sit internally and we'll build prototype automations we call routines for restaurant owners that we think are really good like the one about wholesalers and we'll use that as the seed, right?

所以，当有人加入时，我们会查看你的电子邮件和收件箱，然后觉得你似乎是个餐馆老板。And so when someone joins, we look at your email and inbox and we're like, you seem to be a restaurant owner.

然后，我们会把从那些访谈中精心提炼出来的、我们认为对餐厅老板来说特别重要的问题和潜在解决方案做成模板，展示给你。你注册后就可以开始使用这款产品。与此同时，AI 变得越来越好，我们也在和更多餐厅老板交流。现在，我们能为餐厅老板做的事情不再只有五项，而是有十五项左右。And then we have templates of what we think really good problems and potential solutions are for restaurant owners that we've kind of handcarved from those interviews and we put those in front of you and you sign up and you start using the product. And then AI is getting better and we're talking to more restaurant owners. And now we don't have just five. We have like 15 things that we can do for restaurant owners.

还是有一点手动操作，不过你可以加快这个过程。你可以自动安排面试。你可以问问餐馆老板。你给他们一个 Amazon。Still a little bit manual, but you can speed it up. You can schedule interviews automatically. You can ask the restaurant owners. You give them an Amazon.

你送他们一张免费的亚马逊礼品卡，然后用 AI 录制对他们的访谈，了解他们如何使用你的软件。这样一来，你的工作速度就不再受人类速度的限制，而是跟上了 AI 的速度。这个库会越来越好，模型也会越来越强。You get a free Amazon card and you're doing an AI recorded interview of them and what they do with your piece of software. So you're no longer operating at the speed of humans. You're operating at the speed of AI. And this library is getting better and then the models get better.

因此，现在这些推荐对这个库的依赖会减少，因为我们认为，随着时间推移，通过这种方法，我们将能够为人们提供 80/20、非常定制化的软件。未来，人们不会只扮演一种角色，对吧？比如，你是餐馆老板，但你也负责餐馆的财务，因为没有专人做这件事；你还经营一处度假出租房。所以说到底，你希望 Towny 能把这三件事都做好。此外，你还有两个上学的孩子，它还能帮你安排他们暑假的活动。因此，软件从头到尾都可以量身定制，而我们的信念是，你可以用 AI 来构建这样的软件。And so now the recommendations use the library less because and what we think is over time through this through this approach we'll be offer able to offer 8020 very customized software for people and people aren't just one role in the in the future right like yes you're a restaurant owner but also you run finance for your restaurant too because you don't have a separate person doing that and also you have a vacation rental that you rent and so really you want your towny to be good at those three things and also you have two kids at school and it can help you like schedule their activities for the summer. So it's custom software all the way through and we you know our belief is that you can use AI to build that.

我认为，市场上的另一种策略是 FDE 方法，我想这就是那些实验室采用的做法，而且它与此截然不同。I think the other strategy that you see in the market which is I think what the labs do is a FDE approach and this is very different.

FD就像是：我会安排一个人进入你的企业，了解你的业务是如何运作的，然后他们会利用 AI 为你定制软件，使用我实验室的 AI 来更好地查看情况。我认为 FD 这种做法，你知道，如果你是家愿意每年花 500 万美元向 OpenAI 支付费用、聘请 FDE 的企业，那它现在看起来确实很不错；但我认为随着时间推移，模型越来越好，FD 这种做法实际上会变得糟糕得多。FD is like I'll have a human go into your business, understand how your business runs, then they'll build custom software with AI that uses my labs AI in order to sort of view better. I think the FD approach, you know, if you're enterprise that's willing to spend like 5 million a year paying open AI for FDES, like it looks really good right now, but I think over time as the models get better, the FD approach actually gets much worse.

为什么选择 Town，而不是 OpenAI 和 AnthropicWhy Town over OpenAI and Anthropic

而我们的方法更多是围绕自动化，并利用 AI 构建定制软件，因此可扩展性会好得多。我们押注的是，先从采用 PLG 模式的 SMB、中型市场企业，以及那些技术导向很强的企业入手，因为我们的方法在这些领域非常容易规模化。企业级市场里那些更像是手工打造的软件，就留给其他人去竞争吧。我们押注的是，飞轮效应中积累的经验和优势，长远来看会让我们比这些更定制化的方案更成功。不过，也许还得说明一下，town 为什么比 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 更好——它们现在也有连接器了，你可以接入 Slack、LinkedIn 等。我显然是这么认为的，毕竟我既是 town 的投资人，也是它的重度用户。And our approach which is much more around automation and using AI to build the custom software will scale much better and so the bet we're making is we start with PLG SMB mid-market enterprises that are very tech forward because there our approach scales really really well we'll let other people fight in the enterprise for this much more like handcrafted software and the bet that we're making is the things that we learn in the flywheel that we can get will make us more successful in the long term than these more custom approaches But maybe also define why is town better than OpenAI and Anthropic that now also have connectors like you can hook up your Slack, you can hook up your LinkedIn. I mean obviously I believe I'm both an investor and a power user of town.

所以我已经有了答案，不过我很想听你详细谈谈为什么要用 Town，以及它在商业上的意义。我的意思是，可能有很多正在听这段对话的创业者也会想：糟了，这些家伙会不会抢走我的生意？你们这里有种很奇怪的情况：既有基础设施层，也有应用层。一直以来都是这样。比如说，90 年代的 Cisco 和 Akamai 是基础设施公司，而 Amazon 和 eBay 是应用公司。但 Cisco 从来没想过要说：“你知道吗？我们要做一家书店，要做一个拍卖网站，要做一个像 Yahoo 那样的网站目录，跟别人竞争。”不，他们只要卖自己的交换机、负载均衡器之类的东西就很满足了。所以我很好奇，你能不能谈谈你是怎么理解 Town 的，以及它和那些你经常向其购买代币的人之间有什么区别？So I have my answer, but I'd love to have you expound on why use Town and also just like business. I mean so many people that are probably listening to this that might be entrepreneurs are also wondering like uhoh are those guys going to eat my not you town. like you have this weird situation where you have the infrastructure layer and you have the application layer and that's always been the case where like you know Cisco and Okami were infrastructure companies in the 90s and then Amazon and eBay were application companies but never in a million years did Cisco say you know what we're going to build a book seller we're going to build an auction website we're going to build a directory like Yahoo that competes with no they were just happy selling their switches and load balancers and everything so I'd be curious like you know maybe define how you think about town versus the people that you often buy the tokens from.

那么，其他人应该如何看待我们正在经历的这种奇特时代？在这个时代，基础设施似乎正在变成应用程序。And then how should others maybe think about this kind of weird time that we're living in where it's like infrastructure is becoming application.

主持人：我的意思是，和你的供应商竞争总是有风险的，对吧？而且我们是以更便宜的方式在竞争，对吧？Host: I mean it is not it is risky always to be competing with your suppliers, right? And we are competing in a way cheaper, right?

嘉宾：没错。我们是在和供应商竞争。所以你得问问自己，这种世界状态真的是自然而然、理所当然的吗？一个不太理想的简短回答是：我们对用户体验有着截然不同的理解，尤其是在电子邮件和日历方面。出于某种原因，其他参与者都没有真正关注这一点，而电子邮件和日历又有很多复杂之处，这让我们的产品在这方面好得多。但这只是个简短的回答，因为显然，OpenAI、Anthropic 或 Google 的人都可能突然决定要做这件事。所以，更好的回答其实是考虑我们的客户，以及他们想要什么。Guest: That's right. We're competing against suppliers. So you got to you got to ask yourself is that naturally the right state of the world? So the small answer which is not the good one is we believe very different things about the experience of the user initially around email and the calendar that for whatever reason none of the other players have really focused on and there's a lot of complexity to email and calendar which makes our product much much better there but that's a small answer because obviously someone at open anthropic at Google could wake up and decide to do that so the better answer actually is to think about our customers and what they want.

当我们跟一家中型市场公司沟通时——也就是一家大约有500到1000名员工的公司——我们会问他们：“听着，你知道未来三到五年里，哪家模型提供商会是最好的模型提供商吗？”And when we when we talk to like a mid-market firm, so that's a firm with like 500 to a,000 employees about town, what we tell them is like, hey, listen, do you know which model provider is going to be the best model provider over the next three to five years?

比如，你对此有什么看法？他们也不知道。他们也不知道。然后你就会说，嗯，你知道，如果你买了 OpenAI 的产品，那这个产品里就会一直有 OpenAI 的模型。Like what's your opinion on that? And they don't know. And they don't know. And you're like, well, you know, if you buy the OpenAI product, well, then you'll always have Open AI models in that product.

如果 OpenAI 不是最佳的模型提供商，未来 3 到 5 年也无法为你提供最强大的智能，那么随着 AI 为你承担越来越多的工作，你可能就需要做出关乎竞争力的选择。And what if OpenAI is not the best model provider, doesn't have the best intelligence for you for the next 3 to 5 years, then as AI does more and more for you, you may be at a competitive decision.

主持人：如果他们涨房租呢？Host: What if they hike the rent?

嘉宾：是的，所有这些。所以，首先我们就是想说，我们是一个中立的应用。我们会根据当下的情况，为你选择我们认为最合适的供应商。Guest: Yeah. All of that. And so, the first thing is we're just like, look, we're neutral app. We will use whatever supplier we think is the best for you in the moment.

这也是其中很重要的一部分。我们关注的也不只是整体智能，比如哪家供应商在语音、视频或幻灯片方面表现更好。我们觉得，从各种 AI 能力、前沿模型和开放权重模型中，为你的企业判断什么才是合适的选择，也是我们的职责。我认为，这样不仅能帮你省钱，还能降低选错合作伙伴的风险。And that's like a big part of it. It's also not just general intelligence like which supplier is better at voice, is better at video, is better at slides at that time. Like we feel like it is our job to determine from all the AI capabilities, frontier model, open weight, what is the right thing for you as a business. And I think you can save money there, but also you can derisk ever having made the wrong partner.

有些公司大约两年前选择了 OpenAI，后来有那么 12 个月，Anthropic 的编程能力更强。这些公司不得不两边都用，因为他们意识到，要保持竞争力就需要 Claude，对吧？And there are companies that picked OpenAI like two years ago and then Anthropic was better at coding for a 12-month period and those companies had to use both because they realized to be competitive they needed Claude, right?

而且他们需要那些模型。我认为，如果你是个精明的企业，就会认真考虑由谁为你提供智能服务、由谁负责路由，这些服务是否中立。这是一个原因。我认为第二个非常重要的原因是，我们的立场是：作为一家企业，你拥有——而且是真正拥有——在 Town 上创建的数据、记忆和上下文。所以你知道，在计算机出现之前的旧时代，如果你是一家企业，你会有不同的资产。你有实物资产，也可能有人力资产，对吧？而现在，人们或许会把它称为上下文，但越来越多地，企业拥有这样一类资产：AI 所知道的、能帮助你有效经营企业的一切信息。And they needed those those models and I don't think I think if you're a smart business you really think about the neutrality of the who's providing intelligence for you and who's routing. So that's like one reason. I think the second reason which is like very important is our stance is that you own and like truly own the as a business the data and memories and context that's being that's being created on town. And so you know in the old world pre computing if you're a business you had different assets. you had physical assets and you had maybe like human assets, right? and increasingly now maybe people call it context, but there's the set of assets which is all the things that AI knows about your business to help you run your business effectively.

而且我觉得你应该负责整个这一块。And I think you should own that entire bucket.

我认为你应该尽可能地拥有它，这样一来，如果有一天出现了比 town 更好的解决方案，切换到那个方案只需要一天。你知道，这就是我卖的东西。我卖的是这样一种理念：你应该拥有那项资产。我认为，如果你看看那些为你部署 FDEEs 来构建软件的人，他们实际上是在试图让你无论何时想换成其他人，都变得更加困难。And I think you should own it so much that if there was ever a better solution than town, switching to that other solution would take, you know, a day. And that, you know, that's what I'm selling. I'm selling like you want to own that asset. And I think if if you look at anyone who's deploying FDEEs to build software for you, they actually what they're trying to do is they're trying to make it more difficult for you to switch at any point to someone else.

所以我觉得那是第二个。So I think that's the second.

首先，你需要的是中立的智能。你也希望智能之上的应用层，是一个让你可以安心迁离的平台。在这个新世界里，这意味着你要拥有这一上下文层，并且有人能让你使用它。First, you want neutral intelligence. You also want the app layer on top of the intelligence to be one that you feel comfortable moving away from. In the new world, that means owning this context layer and having someone who makes it available to you.

我在 Town 上承担的风险是，客户更容易转投别家，但这恰恰是我的卖点。如果我做不出市场上最好的产品，也没关系；我会输。这就是我与那些实验室竞争时采取的立场。The risk I’m taking with Town is that switching is easier for my customers, but that’s my selling point. If I can’t have the best product in the market, that’s okay; I’ll lose. That’s my competitive stance against the labs.

第三部分是训练。如果你是一家足够大的公司，实验室就不会拿你的数据来训练。但如果你的业务运营方式最终被写进了某个模型的权重，而这个模型又被别人转售给其他人，那你实际上就是把自己业务成功的秘诀卖给了别人。你肯定不希望这样。The third part is training. If you’re a large enough company, the labs won’t train on you. But if the way you operate your business ever makes it into the weights of someone reselling to someone else, you’re effectively selling what makes your business successful to someone else. You really don’t want that.

所以我想你知道，我们处在训练层。我们就像，你知道，我们不训练——这根本就不是我们作为一家企业的理念的一部分。关于竞争，最后一点是，我们对世界有不同的看法；我认为，我们对人类与 AI 之间关系的看法也不同，而且我们可能比那些实验室更有前瞻性。比如，你知道，团队为 Town 打造的产品有一种模式，基本上就是构建一个内部 CRM，让我们信任智能体，由它们决定公司里的哪些信息可以提供给其他员工。So I think you know we are on on the training layer. We are like you know we don't we don't train like that's just not part of our philosophy as a business. And then the final one on competition is we believe different things about the world and about I think the relationship between a human and AI where we are probably more forward thinking than even the labs are. So, you know, the team's product for town has a mode around basically building an internal CRM where we're trusting agents to decide what information at the company that would is available to other employees at the company.

我举个例子。假设你在 Town 里，你问：“有人认识这家潜在客户的财务团队里的人吗？”Town 就能查看并联系你当前公司其他员工的智能代理，找到与这条你想跟进的潜在客户线索有关联的人。Let me just give you an example. like you're in town and you say, "Does anyone know someone in the finance team at this potential customer?" And Town's able to look at talk to the agents of other employees at your current company to find someone who's connected to that lead that you want.

这就像是一个非常强大的产品，但从隐私角度来看，你真的必须把它设计得非常非常好，才能让它正常运作。我对此的理解是，我们真正思考的是，如何让 AI 帮助人类以 AI 的速度而不是人类的速度运作。对于刚才那个问题，按人类的速度来处理，你会去 Slack 或 Microsoft Teams 里问：“有人认识那个团队里的人吗？”然后你公司的每个人都得读这条消息、想一想，最后你才会得到答案。That's like a really powerful product, but from a privacy perspective, you really have to design it really, really well to work. And the way I think about that is we are really thinking about how do you get AI to operate humans to operate at the speed of AI and not at the speed of humans. So the speed of humans version of that question that just asked is you would go in Slack or Microsoft Teams and be like does anyone know someone at that team and then everyone at your company would have to read that message and think about it and you get an answer.

主持人：是的。没错。Host: Yeah. Exactly.

嘉宾：还有和我们一起的Guest: And with us

主持人：人类是缓慢的路由器。Host: humans are slow routers.

嘉宾：没错。对我们来说，你会立刻得到答案，因为我们已经决定，对于这类问题，我们会相信 AI 能在公司内部协调处理该请求的安全与隐私问题。你知道，我们相信，这样的做法能真正加快公司的发展，而我还没看到其他人这么做。你知道，这就像创建一家初创公司时，你总得思考：未来会是什么样子？Guest: That's right. And for us you're going to get that answer immediately because we've decided that for that kind of a question we will trust AI to mediate the security and privacy of that request within a company. And you know, we believe things like that can really speed up a company that I'm not seeing anyone else do. And you know, it's like when you're building a startup, you always have to think about like what does the future look like?

我认为，未来人类参与其中的程度会比今天低得多。我认为，我们的工作是让企业适应这样的局面，因为对它们来说，这带来的经济收益远远超过它们如今在这方面可能看到的任何风险。所以，这些就是差异化优势。我认为，数据所有权和中立性非常重要。你知道，如果你看看 Rogo 和 Harvey 正在发生什么，对吧？再看看 OpenAI，他们正在打造与之竞争的垂直领域公司。从竞争角度来看，你会觉得，天哪，那些实验室简直势不可挡。但如果你是一家中立企业，正在选择合作对象呢？And I think the future looks like a lot less human in the loop than we see today. And I think our job is to get companies to be comfortable with that universe because the economic benefit for them far outstrips any risks that they would see in that experience today. So those those are the differentiators. I think that like data ownership and neutrality are like so important and you know if you're you know look at what's what's happening to Rogo what's happening to Harvey right if you look in open AI they're building vertical companies that are competing with that and from a competitive standpoint like you're like oh man those labs are really unstoppable but what's if you're a neutral business choosing who to work with

主持人：你得考虑一下，比如说，他们到底要往技术栈上游走多远，对吧？所以我只是从战略角度觉得，对大多数大公司来说，真的受制于某一家实验室是不合理的。Host: that you got to think about like well how far up the stack are they going to go right so I just think strategically It shouldn't make sense for most large companies to really be beholden to any one lab.

嘉宾：感觉这里也存在一个相关性的“恰到好处区间”。如果你的营收有一万亿美元，作为股东我显然会非常高兴。作为 CEO 和联合创始人，你也会非常高兴，但你可能会成为 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 的头号目标。如果你的营收是零，而且没人用你的产品，他们根本不会在意。但如果你是……这有点像是 coding 落在了这个“恰到好处区间”的不利一侧，可以这么说。就像你现在如果是一个 coding agent，谁会每周增加 100 亿美元的营收，或者不管具体是多少——对 Anthropic 来说，这太相关了，他们不能——这里我用了双重否定——他们不能不忽视它，或者，抱歉，他们不能忽视它，这是单重否定。至于你做的事情，你知道，这听起来像是在侮辱你，但并不是。Guest: It seems like it's also like there's the Goldilock zone of relevance here, which is if you had $1 trillion in revenue, I would obviously be very happy as a shareholder. You'd be very happy as a CEO and co-founder, but you'd probably be the number one target for OpenAI and Anthropic. If you have zero dollars in revenue and nobody uses your product, they just wouldn't care. But if you're this is kind of like coding fell in the wrong side of the Goldilock zone arguably like the way that you like if you were a coding agent right now like what is who's adding $10 billion a week or who knows what it is for like anthropic adding so much it's so relevant for them they cannot to use a double negative they cannot not ignore it and or sorry they cannot ignore it just single negative whereas for what you know you're doing where again this sounds like an insult it's not right.

这就像，这可能不是最重要的事。我觉得从长远来看，它实际上是最重要的事，但短期内不是编程，对吧？不是那种“天啊，我非做不可，不然我就完了”的事。因为像 OpenAI，他们似乎从 Anthropic 那里吸取了教训：OpenAI 当时押了大概 50 个方向，而 Anthropic 则全力押注编程，结果做得非常非常好。所以，你知道，这里还有一个关于专注和相关性的因素。看起来他们不会把重点放在医疗、法律、编程这些特别大的领域上——这些都是他们几乎不得不押注的重大方向；而这些分散的、横向的方向，他们似乎更难下定决心去做。我觉得，就 SMB 和 MG 市场而言，我会同意你的看法，但你看，AI 帮企业做更多事情、让企业更成功，这个市场比编程市场更大。It's just like this is probably not the biggest thing. I think it actually is the biggest thing longer term, but short term it's not coding, right? It's not like, oh my god, I have to do this or else it's game over for me because like OpenAI, it seems like they learned that lesson from Anthropic where OpenAI had like 50 bets and then Anthropic went all in on code and that did really really well. So, you know, there's also this element of just kind of like focus and relevance which it seems like they're not going to focus like you know healthcare really big like law really big coding really big these big bets they almost have to make whereas these kind of horizontal ones that are spread out it seems a little bit harder for them to commit to I think for the SMB and MG market I would say I would agree with you but the market is look the market for AI doing more for a business and helping the business be more successful is bigger than the coding market.

主持人：是的，当然。Host: Yeah, for sure.

嘉宾：所以你知道，对我来说，问题在于什么时候，而不是会不会，对吧？我认为在当前的环境下，这还不足以撼动那些公司，但我觉得 12 个月后就会了。所以，进展会非常非常快。Guest: And so, you know, for me it's a question of like when, not if, right? I think in the in the current environment, it's not going to move the needle at those companies, but I think in 12 months it will. And so, it's going to move very very fast.

主持人：是的。只是现在你不能不……这就是我一直在找的那个。你不能不进入编程市场。Host: Yeah. It's just right now you cannot not be this is the one that I was looking for. You cannot not be in the coding market.

嘉宾：没错。Guest: Correct.

为什么硅谷之外对人工智能的关注度不足Why AI is underhyped outside the Valley

主持人：对。不过，这更像是 iPhone、BlackBerry 这样的情况。它有一个扩散……Host: Right. Whereas this is something where it is like the iPhone, Blackberry. There's a diffusion

嘉宾：说到这一点，其实这也是另一个我很想问你的问题。我有个理论，很想看看你是否认同。硅谷几乎把人工智能炒作得过了头——如果这也有可能的话。Guest: point here. And actually, this is another question I'd love to ask you. like I have a theory. I'd love to see see if you agree with it. Silicon Valley almost overhypes AI, if that's even possible.

我不认为AI可能被过度炒作，因为它每周都在变得更好。我觉得世界其他地方对AI的宣传几乎还不够。我有点好奇，你怎么看……人们常谈到跨越鸿沟，但这并不是一个很好的例子，因为AI并不是一种只在这里存在、世界其他地方都没有的技术。I don't think it is possible to overh over overhype AI because every week it's better. The rest of the world, I think, is almost underhyped AI. And I'm kind of curious, how do you think about, you know, this people talk about crossing the chasm, but this is not a great example where it's not like this is a technology that only exists here. It's nowhere else in the rest of the world.

不，人们在世界各地都在用它，只是分布并不均匀。不过我想问，你怎么看哪些地方的 AI 应用还不够？经济中的哪些领域——无论是从地理位置还是职业角度来看——还有一些特定的空白？因为我觉得这就是拥有一个非常通用的产品、一个非常通用的 PLG 产品的妙处：人们可以从世界各地找到人才。No, people are using it throughout the world just not it's not evenly distributed. But I guess how do you think about like where where are we kind of short AI or what pockets of the economy either geographically or by profession or like there's certain areas where because I'm this is the cool thing about having a very horizontal product and having a very horizontal PLG product where people are finding talent from all over the world.

我记得你跟我说过，大概是：“哇，我们在日本火了。”那并不是刻意为之。不是说“我们要去日本做大”，而是就这么在日本火起来了。Like I remember you told me it's like wow we're big in Japan. Like that wasn't intentful. It wasn't like let's go get big in Japan. It just became big in Japan.

所以你发现这种情况到处都有？有没有一些领域让你感到意外，或者让你觉得：“哇，这里的机会其实比人们想象的多得多。”我脑子里想到的都是一些具体例子，比如一家风投公司？有这么一家企业，在岛上把冲浪板租给游客，然后用 Town 检查冲浪板和小沙滩车有没有损坏，再决定之后要不要把押金退给租客。So you're finding this everywhere like are there pockets that have surprised you and there are pockets where you're like wow there's actually a lot more opportunity here than people have thought of. So all I'm thinking I'm thinking about individual anecdotes like I'm thinking about this like VC this business that rents like surfboards on an island to people and then uses town to inspect like surfboards and little like beach buggies whether they've been damaged to decide whether afterwards a person should get their deposit back.

主持人：那真酷。Host: That's pretty cool.

嘉宾：对。但就是，我觉得，那根本不在我的宾果卡上。不在我那张 128×128 格的宾果卡上。简直完全不在上面。Guest: Yeah. But it's like it's like I'm like that is not on my bingo card. It's not on my 128x 128 board bingo card. It's like just nowhere on there.

说到底，实际情况是，那家小企业里有个爱折腾的人，有件事让他很烦，于是他就和 Claude 一起琢磨，想出了如何自动比对这些照片，并决定是否退还客户的押金。让这件事行得通的，正是那个爱折腾的人。所以，我的回答是：我们确实看到 AI 正在经济中各种意想不到的角落得到应用。关键在于，那儿有没有人足够了解 AI，并愿意动手折腾，想办法解决自己的问题。而问题是，世界上爱折腾的人还不够多，或者说，有时间为自己的企业动手折腾的人还不够多。Really, what's happening is there is a tinkerer at that at that small business who there was something that was annoying to them and then they figured out with town how they could automate comparing these pictures and deciding whether to release people's deposits and what makes it work there is the tinker. And so my answer to you is actually we're seeing use in all the weird spots of the economy. And the unlock is there someone over there that gets AI enough to want to tinker a solution to their problem. And the problem with that it is that there aren't enough tinkerers in the world or there aren't enough people that have the time to be tinkerers to help their business.

我认为这就是 AI 没有普及的原因。它之所以没有普及，是因为尽管过去 12 个月里，Claude 或 ChatGPT 已经推出了一些功能，很多小企业都可以用来节省大量时间，但你们用它们的方式却是把它们当作替代品，当成更好用的 Google 搜索。然后你们就会问：“这是怎么回事？”原因在于，产品体验不能只是一个文本框。我们必须做的是：你没法教会别人，你只能把它的价值展示给他们看，并替他们把事情做好。And I think that's why AI is not diffusing. The reason why it's not diffusing is because even though in claude or in chat GPT there has existed for the last 12 months features that at a lot of small businesses you could use to save you so much more time but instead what you're doing is you're using them as a replacement as like a better Google search and you're like what's happening and it's because the product experience can't just be a text box and what we have to do is we have to you can't teach someone, you have to just show the value prop to someone and do it for them.

我觉得这才是真正的突破。所以你知道，对于我们的产品来说，是什么让用户愿意一直使用 Town 呢？就是他们已经连接了自己的邮箱、日历，最好还连接了一个对业务至关重要的核心记录系统，然后又构建了一个自定义集成。I think that's like the real unlock. And so whenever you know for our product like the what makes someone stick with town like it's this they've connected their email, their calendar and ideally one really important system of record for their business and then they've built one custom integration.

也就是说，他们做出了一样开箱即用的产品里没有、却非常神奇的东西。我想做的就是摆脱定制集成，让每个人都能受益——也就是说，你一连接自己的记录系统，我能不能以一种非常贴合你的方式为你创造价值，真正帮到你？这就是机会所在，也就是为什么你没有看到它均匀地普及开来。在硅谷，我们都在工程师身边的公司工作，所以我们离这种本能的问题解决方式更近，也更喜欢动手折腾；我们的公司里到处都是爱折腾的人。That is they've built one thing that didn't come out of the box that was magical. And I'm trying to just get rid of the custom integration. I'm going to get each person which is as soon as you connect your system of record, can I deliver value to you in a way that feels very you that really helps you and that's the opportunity and that's why you don't see it spread evenly. It's because in Silicon Valley there's we're all working at companies next to engineers and so we're we're much closer to this innate problem solving and tinker like we have tinkerers everywhere in our firms.

所以没错，我们的公司正在有效地使用 AI，而世界上大多数人却没有这样的条件。这才是真正的问题。如果你能解决这个问题，让不爱折腾的人也能在 AI 世界里获得和爱折腾的人一样的价值，那你今天就能打造一家规模庞大的企业，因为 AI 可以解决许多商业问题。So yeah, our firms are using AI effectively and most of the world just doesn't have that. And so that's the real problem. And if you can fix that, if you can make a non-tinker into getting the same value as a tinkerer in the AI in the world of AI, like you could be a ginormous business today because AI can solve so many business problems.

就像你并不需要更多的智能。智能已经存在了。没错，关键只是如何大规模有效地部署它？Like you don't need more intelligence. The intelligence is there. Yeah. It's just how do you deploy it effectively at scale?

主持人：是的。而且感觉这是一个集成问题，也是一个产品营销问题。Host: Yeah. And it feels like it's an integration problem. It's a product marketing problem.

嘉宾：是的。Guest: Yes.

主持人：因为每个人都……而且我觉得这对我来说也真的很有意思。我在哈佛遇到一位教授，她是位非常非常聪明的女性。她算是那里的二号人物。我在和她聊人工智能。她说：“是啊，几年前我试过这个。”Host: Because everybody and it's also I think this is really interesting to me as well. I met a professor at Harvard, very very smart woman. she's like the number two person there. And I'm talking to her about AI. She's like, "Yeah, I tried this a few years ago.

还行，但不算特别好。”我就说：“不，不，现在真的很好了。”于是我用 AI，让 ChatGPT 重写了她 20 多年前写的论文，不过现在里面的内容都更新了。就像是把所有内容都换成当下的。她当时说：“太棒了。这是什么 AI？”我说：“是 ChatGPT。”她说：“它是免费的吗？It was okay, not great." And I was like, "No, no, it's really good now." So I had AI, I had Chad GBT rewrite her dissertation that she wrote 20ome years ago, but everything is now current. Like take everything today like and she was like, "This is amazing. what AI is this? And I'm like, it's chat GB. She's like, it's free.

是啊。Yeah.

嘉宾：她就像是在说，这怎么回事？就是因为事情发展得这么快，而且你知道，很多人都是根据现状来评判事情的。我觉得还有一点是，硅谷往往会根据事情未来可能发展到什么程度来评判。Guest: She's like, how is that? It's like because this is moving so quickly and you know, a lot of people they judge things on the present. I think that's the other thing is like Silicon Valley tends to judge like where it could be.

主持人：有时候你会过度吹捧现实，谈什么现实扭曲力场之类的，但你也看得出来这可能会发展成什么样。很多其他人则是只把它看成今天这个样子。问题是，这些东西的发展曲线也很陡峭——如果你顺着这条曲线往下看，我的意思是，没错，就它今天的发展状况而言，感觉人们并没有充分利用它，部分原因在于他们几乎讽刺性地成了早期采用者。是的。Host: And that's where sometimes you oversell reality and reality distortion field this that and the other, but you see where this could go. And a lot of other people it's like they see it as it is today. And it's like the slope of this stuff is also such where it's like if you follow this curve I mean yes where it is today it feels like people aren't taking advantage of it partially because they were almost ironically early adopters. Yes.

嘉宾：他们两年前试过某种东西。他们当时说，是啊，这个会产生幻觉，会做这个做那个，效果不太好。然后他们就……他们已经把那个版本的现实固化下来了。现在要是再试一次，他们只会说：“我这个实验已经做过十次了。”所以他们就会问：“你从哪儿弄来这个 AI 的？这跟我用的 AI 根本不是一回事。”Guest: They tried something two years ago. They were like yeah this hallucinated this did that it didn't really work that well and then they're they're they've kind of oified that version of the reality. And like if they try it again now it's just I've done this experiment like 10 times. So like where did you get that AI? like that's not the AI that I have.

就像是，没错，确实如此。你只需要再试一次。It's like yes it is. You just have to try it again.

主持人：是啊，我的意思是，因为产品领域的发展太快了，这种情况还会不断发生，对吧？所以我觉得，最终胜出的平台，是能不断让业务适应最先进 AI 的平台。问题就在这里：AI 会一直、一直、一直、一直进步下去，人们对什么能做、什么不能做，什么难、什么不难的认知也会随之颠覆。我的意思是，就拿现在的电脑操作和浏览器操作来说吧：在过去两个半月里，助手已经能做一些六个月前几乎不可能做到的事情了，对吧？而且成功率有 90%，以前却只有 30%。大多数人还没体验过这种变化，所以当你做演示，展示它替你买东西，或者用你的软件帮你完成某项任务时，你会忍不住想：“等等，做这个不是得有个 UI 吗？”人们就会说：“哇，我完全不知道还能这么做。”Host: Yeah. I mean the because the product space is moving so fast this is going to keep happening right. So I think the winning platform is one that continues to adapt the business to the best AI like that's the problem because the AI will just keep improving and improving and improving and improving forever and people's mental model of what's possible and not possible what's difficult and not difficult will backwards. I mean just with computer use and browser use today like in the last two and a half months the assistants can do things that were near impossible six months ago right and they can do them 90% of the time whereas before they were doing it like 30% of the time most people don't they've not experienced that and that's why when you do a demo with town of it's shopping for something for you or it's like using your software to do something that you're like wait don't you need a UI to do that people are like wow I had no idea I could do this.

嘉宾：是的。Guest: Yeah.

主持人：但我觉得，我不知道该怎么把这个卖给大家，因为如果你告诉大家，比如说“哦，现在 Claude 能操作电脑了”，你知道，这并不意味着什么。得说得具体得多，比如：“嘿，我可以为这个活动做海报，做出来的效果跟你一直在 Canva 里做的一模一样。嘿，我还可以用你的 Canva 订阅来做，对吧？毕竟你已经在为它付费了。”Host: but I don't think I don't know how you market that to people because I think if you told people like, oh, town now has computer use, you know, that doesn't mean anything. It needs to be much more concrete like, hey, like I can make posters for this event that like look just like the ones that you've been making in Canva. Hey, I can do it using your Canva subscription, right? Because you're already paying for it.

然后就像是，你想让我就这么做吗？那个人就会说，And like, do you want me to just do that? And the person will be like,

嘉宾：对，我们先试着把这件事过一遍。然后五分钟后，当它只花了 25 美分就给你展示了某个特别有价值的东西时，它就该问：“你注意到我的日历里有这样的活动，要不要以后每次有这种活动时都帮我做这个？”接下来，你单独更新了你的小企业或中型公司的设计风格，那么它应该能自动跟上——你甚至都不该需要开口问。下次它制作传单时，传单就应该采用新的设计风格，因为它本来就该替你留意到这一点。再往后，等它能有效地制作视频时，它就该问：“你还想让我制作视频素材，好让你在 Instagram 上宣传这件事吗？”它只需要主动提出这些越来越让人觉得以当今技术水平根本不可能实现的事情，但实际上，这不过是顺着模型能力不断提升的趋势，看看它们将来能为你做些什么。Guest: yeah, let's like do a pass at that. And then five minutes later when for 25 cents it's shown you something that's super valuable that needs to go like hey do you want me to do that before every event like this that I noticed in your calendar and then what happens is you separately change the design of your small business or your mid-market firm and then it should be like it you shouldn't even have to ask but the next time it makes flyers the flyers should look like the new design and it because it should have noticed that for you and you know next when it can do video effectively should be like, "Hey, do you also want me to make video assets so you can advertise this on Instagram?" It just needs to suggest this increasing like things that are feel increasingly impossible in today's technology, but really it's just following the curve of what the models will be able to do for you.

中立代理人与破裂的广告契约Neutral agents and the broken ad covenant

主持人：嗯，你可能已经注意到，智能体流量——这里很大程度上并不是助手型智能体的流量，而是广义上的智能体流量——已经远远超过了人类流量。这算是第一点。另一件最近经常出现在新闻里的事，是围绕新一代智能体的一种做法：对抗式，或者说协同式。这里说的智能体，不是像 ChatGPT 那样只是在互联网上搜索，而是真正主动地替你做事。Host: Well, you've probably seen that agent traffic, and this is largely not assistant agent, but just kind of agent traffic at large, has vastly surpassed human traffic. So, that's kind of point one. And then the other thing that's been in the news a lot is about this kind of adversarial versus call it maybe synergistic approach to agents kind of this new generation of agents. Not agents as in like you know chat GPT is you know just searching something on the internet but actually doing proactively things on your behalf.

所以，亚马逊显然采取了一种有些对抗性的做法，这也说得通，因为他们是一家广告公司。而且，互联网长期以来一直存在这样一种约定：我去 Yahoo Finance 查股票报价，Yahoo 花钱从纳斯达克之类的地方获取股票报价数据，但我的眼球随后就会看到一则 E*Trade 广告。这个约定就像是在说：“Yahoo，我给你免费的股票报价，你把你的眼球给我。”So like Amazon has obviously adopted a somewhat adversarial approach which makes sense because they're an advertising company and like there was this covenant that existed on the internet for a long time. I go to Yahoo Finance to look up a stock quote. Yahoo pays money to go get a feed of stock quotes from the NASDAQ or something, but my eyeballs then hit an Erade ad and the covenant is like I Yahoo give you Alex free stock quote if you give me your eyeball

嘉宾：而这种契约已经被打破了。所以，那些某种程度上碰上这种契约破裂的人会变得对立，但感觉这里有很大的协同机会。就像，哇。就像新的 SEO。Guest: and that covenant has been broken. So that's so like people that have kind of hit that broken covenant are adversarial but it feels like there's a big opportunity to be synergistic. It's like, wow. Like, it's like the new SEO.

如果，如果我能成为智能体流量的接收方，不去拦截它，不去琢磨怎么阻止它，而是想想怎么欢迎它呢？这似乎也是另一边一个巨大的机会。If if I can be on the receiving end of agent traffic and not block it, not figure out how do I stop this, but like, how do I welcome it? It seems like a massive opportunity on the other side there, too.

主持人：是啊。我是说，你知道，亚马逊的损失应该就是沃尔玛的收益。没错。嗯。Host: Yeah. I mean, you know, Amazon's loss should be Walmart's gain. Yeah. Right.

我是说，沃尔玛，你知道，他们没有广告业务，所以他们的激励机制会有所不同。我想，嗯，正如你所说，分发方式已经变了。顺便说一句，我觉得智能体有意思的地方在于：如果你不再相信智能体本身不会对某些东西感兴趣，那么分发方式会如何变化？这有点让人摸不着头脑，对吧？I mean, Walmart, you know, the they don't have the advertising business, and so, you know, their incentives are going to be different. And I think some I mean to your point distribution has changed. I think the part that's interesting about the agent by the way is how does distribution change if you no longer trust your agent themselves not being interested in things is like a little bit of an interesting question mark. Right?

比如说，你使用 Meta 的智能体，而 Meta 有大型广告商。然后你问它，比如说，联合航空在 Meta 上投放的广告比那些你叫不出名字的航空公司多得多，然后你让它帮你订一趟航班。你知道，如果你觉得它给你的建议不再中立，会发生什么吗？问题在于，人们始终有推广产品和做营销的动机。那么，在一个人的目光不再关注这些东西的世界里，情况会是什么样子，这是个完全开放的问题。So say you use the Meta agent and Meta has large advertisers and then you ask it and say like United Airlines advertises a lot more on Meta than than you know nobody airlines and then you ask it to do a flight. You know what happens if you feel like it's no longer giving you the neutral thing because this is the thing is there's always a there's what is there's still human incentives to promote products and marketing and so what does that look like in the world where you the human's eyeballs are no longer looking at things is a very open question.

我坚信，你想要的是一个中立、属于你自己的智能代理，你毫不怀疑，它唯一的资金来源就是作为用户的你自己的钱包；而创建这个代理的人，他们的动力是为你这个人提供最好的信息，不受营销这股强大力量的扭曲。然后，作为一个人，你有自己的品味，并通过自己做出的选择表达这种品味。你可以问你的智能代理：“嘿，大家在 Instagram 上都在聊什么？”或者“现在在投放什么广告？”你可以问这样的问题，因为在这些方面，你希望受到广告和营销世界的影响；但再说一次，你希望你的智能代理相对于这一点保持中立，正如你谈到的对抗性与非对抗性之别。我觉得另一个在概念上很有意思的是，有些体验会带来你作为一个人乐于享受的摩擦，但有些摩擦你并不喜欢。比如我在纽约市苏活区四处逛街购物。I'm a firm believer in the like you want a neutral agent that is yours that you have no doubt like the only source of money for the agent is your wallet as the user and then whoever is creating that agent their incentive is to give you the best information for you as a human with no distortion in terms of the great forces of marketing. And then you as a human you have taste and you express your taste as you make the choices that you do. And you can ask your agent like hey what are people talking about in Instagram or like what's being advertised on you can ask that question because there you want to be flavored by the world of advertising and marketing but again you want your agent to be neutral visa v that the other you talk about adversarial versus not I think the other thing that is interesting to me conceptually are like experiences like friction that you enjoy as a human but that friction that you don't so me walking around Soho in New York City shopping.

我享受这种不便。我喜欢必须在各家店之间步行。我喜欢排队时身边还有其他人，因为我可以模仿他们的穿搭。我喜欢这种不便。It's friction that I enjoy. I like that I have to walk between stores. I like that there are other humans waiting in line because I can copy their styles. I like the friction.

这是购物中令人愉快的一部分。我喜欢做这个。然后还有一些我不喜欢的麻烦。我想要，比如说，在家订卫生纸。我不……你懂我的意思吧？It's an it's a part of that shopping that is enjoyable. I like doing it. then there's friction that I don't enjoy. I want to like order toilet paper at home. I don't I'm not you know what I mean?

我只是想要一直订购的那款厕纸。就是尽可能快、尽可能便宜地把它买到手。所以我觉得，有时候我们太过关注智能体，就会过度着眼于减少阻力和繁琐事务，让一切尽可能高效。但你知道，人类并不总是以效率为优化目标。I just want the same toilet paper that I've been ordering for a while. Like just get it in there as quickly as possible like and as cheaply as possible. And so I think sometimes when we think about agents too much, we think too much about reducing friction and toil and making thing as efficient as possible. But humans don't always optimize, you know, for efficiency.

所以你知道，对我来说，亚马逊这个广告例子是这样的：我觉得有些时候我在亚马逊上，比如给孩子买乐高的时候，我确实希望看到其他适合我儿子的拼搭类玩具广告，因为我可能会发现其中有一款不是乐高品牌的，我之前不了解它，但觉得挺有意思。然后我会想让我的智能助手帮我找一些关于它的评价，也可能会想：“这款玩具挺有意思的，孩子们喜欢吗？也许我想买一款。”在这种体验中，我觉得亚马逊能赚很多钱，而那些汇集各类供给、提供广告和营销服务的平台仍然有价值。And so, you know, the Amazon example for me on the ad is like actually I think there's times when I'm on Amazon, like when I'm buying Legos for my kids, where I do want ads of other construction like toys for my son because I may realize one I it's not Lego branded and I don't know about it and it's interesting and then I want to ask my agent for some reviews of it and I might be that's an interesting is it popular with the kids and maybe I want to buy it. And in that experience, I think Amazon can make a ton of money and there will still be value for places that are aggregates of supply with advertising and marketing.

但我觉得很多时候，你是在尽量减少阻力，而你并不希望出现那些东西。But I think there's a lot of times where you're optimizing for friction where you don't want that stuff.

所以，如果我是亚马逊，拥有每年 800 亿美元，或者说 700 亿美元左右的广告业务，我会问的是：嘿，我觉得你们不想屏蔽智能代理，因为我认为它们可能会发展成比亚马逊还大的公司。比如说，一个无头亚马逊可能会成为一家非常非常庞大的企业，对吧？但我认为，这会给他们带来更大压力，促使他们打造一种独立的体验，在那里你确实希望看到广告，并让这种体验本身值得继续发展。我觉得，对于那些东西，我还是会去亚马逊。So the if I were Amazon and I had the 80 billion or whatever $70 billion a year like advertising business the question that I would ask is like hey I don't think you want to block agents because I think that is I think they may be a bigger than Amazon company like a headless Amazon could be a huge huge business right but I think it puts more pressure on them to create a separate experience where you do want the ads and that's really good and making that worthwhile to go on for on its own and I think I would still go to Amazon for those things,

嘉宾：你知道，说到底。Guest: you know, at the end of the day.

主持人：但是你知道，AI 的发展速度太快了，它将以一种我认为没人能预测的速度改变分发方式和人类习惯，也就是说，没人能预测这些领域里最终胜出的平台会是什么样子，而且会有巨大的输家，对吧？亚马逊可能会在试图对抗未来的过程中失去一大块广告业务，但又因为他们无法预测未来会是什么样子……另外一个让我感兴趣的是 Muse。我不知道你有没有看到关于 Muse 的讨论。比如免费的报价、免费的个人代理。Host: But, you know, the AI is moving so fast that it's going to change distribution and human habits at a rate where I don't think anyone can predict where the winning platforms will be in those spaces and there's going to be huge losers, right? And Amazon might lose a huge chunk of their advertising business trying to fight the future be but because they can't predict what it would look like without like the other one that's interesting is Muse for me. I don't know if you've seen the discussion around Muse. like free quotes free personal agent.

酷。人们会说：“好吧，总有一天他们得在 Muse 里投放广告。”但实际上，也许他们永远都不必在 Muse 里投放广告。也许 Muse 只会给他们提供数据，让他们能在 Instagram 上更精准地向你投放广告。Cool. People are like, well, one day they're going to have to put ads in Muse. But actually, if you maybe they never have to put ads in Muse. Maybe Muse just gives them data that allows to target you better on Instagram.

而当你打开 Instagram 时，你上 Instagram 就是因为你并不追求效率。And when you go to Instagram, you're on Instagram because you don't want efficiency if you're on Instagram.

嘉宾：你想获得娱乐，对吧？而且，如果他们能利用 Muse 提供的信息，在 Instagram 上更精准地进行定向；而 Muse 仍然免费。现在你在 Instagram 上看到喜欢的东西时，他们还可以让你用一个钱包来付款——这个钱包是他们通过 Muse 为你积累起来的。或者，Muse 可以在线搜索这类东西的不同款式。这就像一个非常棒的飞轮。这意味着，在这种个人使用场景中，你已经把变现与代理体验分离开了。我觉得，像亚马逊这样的公司处于劣势，可能就是因为在代理的世界里，仅仅做供给的聚合者，未必是个好生意模式。Guest: You want to be entertained, right? And if they can target better on Instagram because of the information from Muse and Muse is still free and on Instagram now when you see the good that you like, they can also get you to pay for it using a wallet that they've accumulated on you from Muse or Muse can look online for different variants of the thing. It's like a really nice flywheel and what it what it means is that you've divorced the monetization from the agent experience for this personal use case. And that's like a you know it's and that's where a property like Amazon is at a disadvantage I think is it might be with agents like you can't having just been the aggregator of supply just may not be a good business model in the world of agents.

主持人：它可能已经不复存在了，所以他们对此确实无能为力。他们会输，而说实话，他们可能的应对之策就是拥有一位个人代理。Host: It just may no longer be and so there's really not much they can do about it. They're going to lose and probably the counter move for them honestly is they should have a personal agent.

嘉宾：是的。Guest: Yeah.

主持人：他们应该有一个 Muse 的竞争对手，这才是他们真正的反制之举。不是去写 Muse 的博客，而是要拥有一个 Muse。Host: They should have a muse compet like that's actually the counter move for them. It's not to blog muse, it's to have a muse,

嘉宾：有一位更好的缪斯，Guest: have a better muse,

主持人：有一个更好的灵感来源，而且能独家购买那个东西，希望这足以成为一种激励，并把它纳入 Prime。不过，你知道，我不知道他们能不能做到。有意思的是，像亚马逊就有一个叫 Camel Camel Camel 的网站。Host: a better muse and have the exclusive on shopping for that and hope that's enough of an incentive and put it part of Prime. But, you know, I don't know if they're able to do that. Well, the fun thing is like with Amazon, so they there's a website called Camel Camel Camel.

嘉宾：这是一个亚马逊价格引擎。基本上，你只要说：“我想知道 Dr. Pepper 现在卖 8 美元，等它降到 6 美元时告诉我。”Guest: It's a price engine for Amazon. So, you basically say, I want to know when Dr. Pepper is right now it's $8. Tell me when it's $6.

主持人：然后买下它。基本上，Host: And then buy it. Basically,

嘉宾：第二个是6美元。不，它不会替你购买。它只是给你发邮件，然后你得自己去买。Guest: the second it's $6. No, it doesn't do the buying. It just emails you and then you have to do the buying.

主持人：嗯。Host: Yeah.

嘉宾：有 2000 万人使用这个网站。Guest: 20 million people use this website.

主持人：2000万人。Host: 20 million people.

嘉宾：是的。美国有2000万人。Guest: Yeah. 20 million people in America.

主持人：这只是Host: This is just

嘉宾：这是一个联盟营销网站，已经运营了 18 年。比如说，我——我和 Jesse 写过一篇关于这个的文章，里面提到预测未来的最佳方式就是观察当下。再说一次，回到“它的分布并不均匀”这一点；这东西就是未来，因为看待智能体的另一种方式是，有些人时间比钱多。Guest: and it's an affiliate website and this has been around for 18 years. So like my So Jesse and I wrote a post about this where the best way to predict the future is to observe the present. Again, going back to like it's not evenly distributed and like this thing is the future because like the other way of thinking about agents is there are people that have more time than money.

主持人：没错。那些钱多、时间少的人。Host: Yeah, that's right. People that have more money than time.

嘉宾：是的。Guest: Yep.

主持人：那些时间比金钱宝贵的人，不会用 CamelCamelCamel。时间比钱充裕的人才会用。不过，等一下，如果现在你能把所有工具都交给那些时间比金钱宝贵的人，让智能代理替他们操作呢？那他们当然会用。这就是智商测试。Host: And people that have more money than time, they're not going to use camel camel camel. People that have more time than money, they are. but wait a minute, what if you now can give everybody who has more money than time, give them all of the tools and the agent does it? Like, of course, they're going to use that. It's an IQ test.

所以，这些东西肯定会变得更加普遍。再说，有时候你甚至不必去想象可能会发生什么。看看优惠券之类的就行。So, these things are definitely going to be a lot more pervasive. And again, sometimes you don't even have to like picture what might happen. You just have to look at like, you know, coupons.

嘉宾：是啊。优惠券。比如说，如果你很有钱，就不该用优惠券，因为太费时间了。你会花差不多两个小时去找合适的优惠券。但你猜怎么着？Guest: Yeah. coupons. Like you shouldn't use a coupon if you're wealthy because it takes too much time. You're going to spend like two hours like hunting for the right coupon. But guess what?

就这样，这又是一个被打破的约定，因为那曾是一种非常巧妙的划分世界的方式。Like so and that's another covenant that's being broken because it was a very neat way of dividing the world.

主持人：是的。我是说，MX 高级会员也是一样的。现在它只会优化你所有的……你所有的……Host: Yeah. I mean MX premium membership it's the same way. Now it'll just optimize all of your all your

嘉宾：断裂模型已经死了。Guest: the breakage model is dead.

主持人：是啊。所以我们都会把 Chase 和 MX 的所有福利都用个遍，然后就得换掉它。对……来说不划算。Host: Yeah. And so we're all going to abuse all of our Chase and MX benefits and then we're going to have to change it. It's not cost effective for

嘉宾：因为那样就会变成对抗性的。这有点像对抗与协同的区别。顺便说一句，贯穿这些观点的一条主线是：我认为，供应聚合的价值远不如过去那么高了。过去它很有价值，是因为人的注意力有限；而现在它的价值低得多，因为人的注意力可以通过自动化来替代。Guest: because then it's going to be adversar. This is kind of the adversarial versus synergistic thing. So, by the way, the through line all those is I just think supply aggregation is a lot less valuable than it used to be very valuable because human attention was limited and now supply aggregation is a lot less valuable because human attention can be automated away.

主持人：是的，这次谈话非常精彩。再次感谢你今天过来，尽情发挥吧。Host: Yeah, this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you again for coming in today and go town.

嘉宾：是的，非常感谢你，Alex。能聊聊总是很开心。Guest: Yeah, thanks so much, Alex. It's always great to chat.

主持人：好的，谢谢。Host: All right, thank you.